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wednesday , december 1, 2010 EZ RE

ONLINE
What do you do
I started off with the relatively modest goal of just
with a book reviewer? trying to get people to listen” — Ben Affleck, C2
To watch video of Ron Charles,
The Totally Hip Video Book
THE TV COLUMN BACKSTAGE
Reviewer, as he goes fishing
for Moby Dick, go to Morning toss-y ‘A Christmas Carol’
washingtonpost.com/style CBS shuffles “Early Show” lineup: Paul Morella goes solo in the
Smith and Rodriguez are out. C3 Dickens classic. C2

3 LIVE TODAY @ washingtonpost.com/discussions The Post’s columnists Amy Argetsinger and Roxanne Roberts discuss your favorite gossip and their recent columns. Noon

COMMENTARY

Museums shouldn’t bow to censorship of any kind

BY B LAKE G OPNIK
Against all odds, the stodgy old Na-
tional Portrait Gallery has recently be-
come one of the most interesting, daring
institutions in Washington. Its 2009
show on Marcel Duchamp’s self-portray-
al was important, strange and brave.
“Hide/Seek,” the show about gay love that
it opened in October, was crucial — a first
of its kind — and courageous, as well as
being full of wonderful art. My review of
it was a rave.
Now the NPG, and the Smithsonian
Institution it is part of, look set to come
off as cowards. Today, after a few hours of
pressure from the Catholic League and
various conservatives, it decided to re-
move a video by David Wojnarowicz, a
gay artist who died from AIDS-related
illness in 1992. As part of “Hide/Seek,” the
gallery was showing a four-minute ex-
cerpt from a 1987 piece titled “A Fire in
My Belly,” made in honor of Peter Hujar,
an artist-colleague and lover of Wojnaro-
wicz who had died AIDS complications in
1987. And for 11 seconds of that meander-
ing, stream-of-consciousness work (the
full version is 30 minutes long) a crucifix
appears onscreen with ants crawling on
it. It seems such an inconsequential part
of the total video that neither I nor
anyone I’ve spoken to who saw the work
remembered it at all.
But that is the portion of the video that
DAVID WOJNAROWICZ
HOT: An image from the video “A Fire
in My Belly” by David Wojnarowicz,
pulled from NPG’s “Hide/Seek” show.
the Catholic League has decried as “de-
signed to insult and inflict injury and
assault the sensibilities of Christians,”
and described as “hate speech” — despite
the artist’s own hopes that the passage
would speak to the suffering of his dead
friend. The irony is that Wojnarowicz’s
reading of his piece puts it smack in the
middle of the great tradition of using
images of Christ to speak about the
suffering of all mankind. There is a long,
respectable history of showing hideously
grisly images of Jesus — 17th-century
sculptures in the National Gallery’s re-
cent show of Spanish sacred art could not
have been more gory or distressing — and
Wojnarowicz’s video is nothing more
than a relatively tepid reworking of that
imagery, in modern terms.
Until Tuesday afternoon, museum
staff, under Director Martin E. Sullivan,
believed that “Fire” was interesting art
that made important points. And now it
looks as though they’re somehow saying
that they were wrong about that, and that
it really was unfit to be seen or shown,
after all.
If every piece of art that offended some
person or some group was removed from
a museum, our museums might start
looking empty — or would contain noth-
ing more than pabulum. Goya’s great
nudes? Gone. The Inquisition called
them porn.
gopnik continued on C5

Their warped, low-budget

TV bits made comedy duo
Tim and Eric into cult
favorites; now, they’re
taking the act on the road
— and to the big screen

AWESOMELY
BIZARRE BY A ARON L EITKO clowns and eerie edutainment that preached, “All the food
is poison.”
their “Chrimbus Spectacular 2010” tour.
SPECIAL
ADULT SWIM

W
atching “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great
Job!” it can be difficult to remember that
you’re supposed to laugh, not cringe.
For three years and five gloriously weird
seasons, the 11-minute sketch show, created
by Pennsylvania-bred comedians Tim Heidecker and Eric
Wareheim, has delivered some of the most polarizing
humor ever to hit basic cable: You get it, or you don’t.
“Awesome Show,” which aired on Cartoon Network’s
late-night programming block, Adult Swim, was an absurd-
ist take on community access television — a phony network
populated by spray-tanned pitchmen, frowny-faced child
Think David Lynch meets Ron Popeil, plus toilet gags.
When you weren’t wincing, it was very, very funny.
And now it’s gone. As of last spring, Heidecker and
Wareheim have placed “Awesome Show” on indefinite
hiatus. In part, they’ve simply outgrown their microscopic
time slot. On Dec. 5, Adult Swim will broadcast a Tim and
Eric “Chrimbus Special,” a 44-minute holiday spoof. In
March, the duo will begin shooting its first feature film,
“Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie.”
In the meantime, Heidecker and Wareheim have decided
to hit the road. Wednesday night, their tour brings them to
the State Theatre in Falls Church, one of the final stops on
HOLIDAY: Tim
Last week, sitting on the steps of Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Heidecker, left,
Library Music Hall before their gig, Heidecker and and Eric
Wareheim, both 34, looked worn out. Wareheim, right,
It’s not their first time on tour; they’ve been going out on are touring with
regular month-long jaunts for the past several years. But their “Chrimbus
more than three weeks of wigs, false teeth and rayon Spectacular.”
clothing seem to have taken a toll.
In person, they are affable and strait-laced rather than
gonzo. They have a reputation for giving interviewers a
tim & eric continued on C3

‘Storage Wars’ and ‘Gold Rush: Alaska’ are mining at the recessionary frontier
BY H ANK S TUEVER
If you broaden the definition of Ameri-
can execeptionalism to include rooting
through the contents of abandoned stor-
age units or spending your last few
dollars to trot off to the Alaskan wilder-
ness to backhoe for gold, then America is
looking mighty excep-
TV tional indeed. At least
REVIEWS on television.
A&E’s “Storage
Wars” (premiering Wednesday) and Dis-
covery’s “Gold Rush: Alaska” (premier-
ing Friday) are really just further rumina-
tions on the perceived crises of national
masculinity and consumer confidence.
Both shows feature a gang of frustrat-
ed, fringy, tatoodled, middle-aged men
on a hunt for easy wealth — or a last stab
at financial security. Both shows also
have their moments of absorbing drama
and distasteful levels of bullheadedness,
set against an American backdrop that
once again seems mere steps away from
the full-on, Cormac McCarthy-style apoc-
alypse.
In “Storage Wars,” we follow several
men (and one woman, who is married to
one of them) who attempt to make their
living by chasing auctions at storage-unit
facilities in dusty Southern California
burbs. Here, under a blazing sun in the
Great Recession’s land of extreme fore-
closures, an auctioneer cuts off the lock
of unlucky units where the fee has gone
unpaid for at least 90 days.
The door rolls upward and these mod-
ern-day scavengers get a look at the
EMILY SHUR/A&E mysteries within. The bidders aren’t al-
TREASURE TALK: Auctioneers Dan and Laura Dotson in A&E’s “Storage Wars.” lowed to touch or examine what’s inside;
they have to rely on their foraging in-
stinct. This is, of course, a seductive
process to watch: What could be in those
cardboard boxes near the back? (I know:
old Christmas garlands.)
But wait — are those foot pedals part of
a valuable Hammond B3 or just another
junk organ? “Storage Wars’s” characters
try to outwit one another by driving up
the bids for what in almost every case
winds up being worthless stuff.
Some of them have been at this game
well before the economy tanked and have
prospered at it. Alpha dog Darrell Sheets
shows off his home, resplendent with the
treasures he’s lucked into at auctions,
including two framed sketches he swears
are Picassos.
His chief competitor, consignment
stuever continued on C6
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2010 KLMNO EZ RE C5

NPG
yields to
censors
gopnik from C1

Norman Rockwell would get

the boot, too, if I believed in
pulling everything that I’m of-
fended by: I can’t stand the view
of America that he presents,
which I feel insults a huge num-
ber of us non-mainstream folks.
But I didn’t call for the Smithso-
nian American Art Museum to
pull the Rockwell show that runs
through Jan. 2, just down the
hall from “Hide/Seek.” Rockwell
NICK GALIFIANAKIS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST and his admirers got to have
their say, and his detractors,
including me, got to rant about
Living together how much they hated his art.
Censorship would have prevent- EYE OF THE BEHOLDER: Francisco de Goya’s “La maja desnuda (Nude Maja)” didn’t pass muster
COURTESY MUSEO NACIONAL DEL PRADO

ed that discussion, and that’s

vs. shacking up why we don’t allow it.
Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) has
with critics when it was created. Today it is considered one of the treasures of the art world.

said that taxpayer-funded muse-

ums should uphold “common
on the right-wing Web site CN-
Snews.com mentioned the cruci-
If every piece of puritanical pressures. The
Washington Project for the Arts,
Dear Carolyn:
My boyfriend and I have been standards of decency.” But such fix — but as only one item in a list art that which this year celebrates its
dating for five years. He bought a “standards” don’t exist, and of the exhibition’s “shockers” 35th anniversary, had its finest
house in June. Last weekend, he shouldn’t, in a pluralist society. that included “naked brothers offended some moment when it embraced the
My decency is your disgust, and kissing, genitalia and Ellen De- show instead.
proposed to me, and we are very
much in love and plan on getting one point of museums, and of Generes grabbing her breasts.” person or some So here’s a gauntlet thrown
married next year. CAROLYN HAX contemporary art in general, is (Through a bra, one might note, group was down to test the courage of
His parents are almost insisting to test where lines get drawn and in an image that’s less shocking Washington’s art institutions:
that we live together first. My matter more than the rest. You’ve
got appealing options: a belief in
how we might want to rethink
them. A great museum is a labo-
than many moves by Lady Gaga.)
The same site decries “a painting
removed from a Will the Hirshhorn Museum, the
Katzen Arts Center, tiny Trans-
mother and grandmother believe
that would be an abomination and your own (admirable) ratory where ideas get tested, the Smithsonian itself describes museum, our former, Flashpoint, or even the
our marriage would not have independence; in following your not a mausoleum full of dead in the show’s catalog as ‘homo- Phillips or National Gallery — or
God’s blessing. heart; in honoring your family’s thoughts and bromides. erotic’. ” museums might maybe the Corcoran, in a rare
values; in keeping peace. A belief In America no one group — The attack is on gayness, and redemptive moment — have the
My mother said the same thing
when my older sister decided to in learning what you’re getting and certainly no single religion images of it, more than on sacri- start looking guts to mount the video the
live with her husband before
marrying him.
yourselves into doesn’t seem
quite as impressive, but
— gets to declare what the rest of
us should see and hear and think
lege — even though, last I
checked, many states are sanc-
empty. . . . Portrait Gallery has taken
down?
I am 24 and I have been paying pragmatism rarely does.
I could argue for a belief that
about. Aren’t those kinds of dec-
larations just what extremist
tioning gay love in marriage, and
none continue to ban homosexu-
Goya’s great Artists have the right to ex-
press themselves. Curators have
my own bills since I was 18. I put
myself through college. I have tops them all: in collaborating imams get up to, in countries ality. nudes? Gone. the right to choose the expres-
saved up enough to pay for my with your future husband. This with less freedom? And the Portrait Gallery has sion they think matters most.
own wedding, so money isn’t an isn’t the only right answer, but Of course, it’s pretty clear that given into this attack. The Inquisition And the rest of us have the right
you do need to be able to discuss this has almost nothing to do Twenty-one years ago in to see that expression, and judge
issue.
I would love to move in with my and accommodate each other’s with religion. Eleven seconds of Washington, the Corcoran Gal- called them those choices for ourselves.
fiance. I really don’t think this
would be wrong or a sin,
beliefs, or ... you’re not mature
enough to be married.
an ant-covered crucifix? Come
on.
lery of Art took a huge hit to its
prestige and credibility — a hit it
porn.” If anyone’s offended by any
work in any museum, they have
especially considering that we are If you and he haven’t had at This fuss is about the larger has yet to fully recover from — the easiest redress: They can
going to get married soon. He least one say-it-all conversation topic of the show: Gay love, and when it canceled a show of imag- vote with their feet, and avoid
wants me to move in with him so about this, then you need to. images of it. The headline that es by the gay photographer Rob- the art they don’t like.
we know what we are getting (Include the part about not ran over coverage of the matter ert Mapplethorpe, under similar gopnikb@washpost.com
ourselves into. But he knows I wanting to upset his parents,
would be miserable because my because you may be exaggerating
mother and grandmother would their potential distress; “almost
be disappointed in me. insisting” isn’t insisting, after all,

Lortie pLays
It has been four years since my and it hardly equates to

READ BEFORE YOU RESERVE.

older sister got married and about “abomination.”)
If you have talked it through

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Style
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friday , december 24, 2010 EZ RE

COMMENTARY

Smithsonian
chief’s next
call should be
to step down THE BEST
Decision to remove
video from ‘Hide/Seek’
contradicts mission
BY P HILIP K ENNICOTT
OF THE WEST A SPANISH ROYAL PAINTER REIGNS SUPREME
Three weeks after the Smithso-
nian Institution ignited fury in
AS THE CREATOR OF THE GREATEST WORK OF ART
the museum world by censoring
one of its own exhibitions —
removing a video that appeared
in the National Portrait Gallery’s
groundbreaking exhibition of gay
portraiture, “Hide/Seek” — the
best option for undoing the dam-
age remains the resignation of
the man who made the decision.
Curators of the critically ac-
claimed exhibition, although la-
menting the decision, continue to
defend the Smithsonian in pub-
lic, and the National Portrait
Gallery’s director, Martin Sulli-
van, continues to bear much of
the brunt of the criticism. And yet
Smithsonian Secretary G. Wayne
Clough has gone missing.
Clough’s defense of a decision
that will almost certainly mark
the nadir of his tenure has been
limited to internal memos. By
withdrawing from the public de-
bate about what has been tacti-
cally, strategically and historical-
ly a disaster for the institution, he
has called into question whether
he shares the fundamental values
of openness and engagement that
should define the Smithsonian.
Given that reinstating the vid-
eo — a work by David Wojnarow-
icz that included a brief scene of
ants crawling on a crucifix — is
off the table, the best option for
the Smithsonian is one that
seems paradoxical. The curators
of “Hide/Seek,” and the leaders of
the National Portrait Gallery,
should take control of the com-
plex symbolism of the debate and
do the unthinkable: Remove yet
another work from the exhibi-
tion.

A fundamental
value has been
insulted, and the
system is now
out of balance.
That work would be one of the
show’s most powerful and har-
rowing: AA Bronson’s “Felix,
June 5, 1994.” Bronson wants his
7-by-14 foot photograph taken
out of the show as a protest
against censorship, and his re-
quest is only creating more bad
optics for the Smithsonian.
At a panel discussion Monday
night at the Jewish Community
Center on 16th Street NW, exhibit
co-curator David Ward argued
for rejecting Bronson’s request to
maintain the integrity of the
show’s scholarship. And earlier PRADO MUSEUM
that day, the Smithsonian said it WHO’S THE CENTER OF ATTENTION? Velazquez’s 1656 painting “Las Meninas” portrays so much more than just King Philip IV’s 5-year-old heir.
had the legal right to keep it, no
matter what Bronson wanted.
Once again, in an effort to control BY B LAKE G OPNIK
the damage from Clough’s reck- IN MADRID
less decision, responsible agents

T
of the Smithsonian find them-
selves on the wrong side of some
fundamental conflicts.
Which is why Bronson’s work
should go.
Returning the Smithsonian to
its proper values can now be
accomplished only by someone
underneath the secretary, and
the options are few. Although it
would harm the integrity of the
show, allowing Bronson to re-
move his work would create a
large symbolic hole in the exhibi-
tion, a blank space on the wall,
which could be explained as a
marker of the Smithsonian’s mis-
take and the aggression of out-
side forces that resist the power-
ful, democratic agenda of the
modern museum at its best.
That agenda, the result of de-
commentary continued on C2
here’s too much great art out there. Giant exhibitions fill When Velazquez depicts an aging soldier, he aces every detail, from
our eyes with hundreds of works. Our museums are muscles starting to sag to a mustache that refuses to droop. When he paints a
constantly adding new wings. Television, the Web, spinning wheel in motion, he captures the whir of spokes revolving at speed
magazines, coffee-table books — they spout so many art — using blur to render motion for the first time in history.
stars, we’re drowning in them. Velazquez, the great realist, also gives us perfect dogs and fools and
The remedy: Choose a single work, as great as you can beauties. Then, at the culminating point in his career, banking on his art to
find. Stay with it as long as you can stand, win him a knighthood, he takes on a new challenge: to capture
and let it fill you with as many thoughts as what an unbeatable work of art looks like.
it can trigger. Seek out the very greatest on “Las Meninas” isn’t just a single impeccable piece, such as
art work ever made, not for its price or washingtonpost.com all ambitious artists set out to make every time. It is like an
status, but to see what it offers in a one-on-one encounter. encyclopedia of artistic greatness: It has a gorgeous surface,
Have an affair with a masterpiece. To hear Blake Gopnik amazing space and light, a tantalizing cast and a complex
I tried to do just that earlier this month, when I spent a discuss details of “Las plot; it is stunning as a whole but also when you’re looking at
whole week visiting a single work in the great Prado Museum. Meninas” where it holds a tiny detail in it; it gives instant pleasure as well as slow-burn
The encounter couldn’t have gone been better: It left me court in Madrid’s Prado philosophical rewards. Above all, “Las Meninas” never stops
convinced that “Las Meninas,” the grand canvas of Spanish Museum, go to giving: Every time you think you’re done, the picture insists
court life painted by Diego Velazquez in 1656, is the washingtonpost.com/style. that everything you’ve thought was wrong, and that you’ll
absolutely greatest work of art in the Western tradition. have to start over from scratch. And instead of putting you off,
It’s not just me saying so. I have a reliable source: Don Diego Lay the front and back of it makes you enjoy that relentless perplexity.
Velazquez. He speaks for himself through his art, and he never this section out flat to see
gets anything wrong. “Las Meninas” as you read meninas continued on C8
about it.

BOOK WORLD NAMES & FACES CAROLYN HAX

A biography long on details A holiday breakup A dirty word, no matter the spin
Sam Irvin spares no minutiae in “Kay Thompson,” Rep. James Moran Jr. and his wife of six years are One woman is tired of her husband’s language,
yet you aren’t likely to recognize the “Eloise” author. separating but plan “to be supportive of one another.” but should she first check her own behavior?
C3 C3 C4
C8
The great ‘Las Meninas’: Why it’s No. 1
meninas from C1
Even on the surface, at very first
glance, “Las Meninas” presents itself as a
certifiably “great painting.” When you
stand before it at the Prado, where it has
lived since 1819, you have to be impressed
by the huge canvas. It fills the better part
of a wall at the far end of the museum’s
most imposing gallery. The room is often
full, but the power of this work keeps its
audience hushed. Even school groups
settle down.
It starts with a girl
The painting’s subject is grand. The
little girl at the painting’s center is the
5-year-old Infanta Margarita of Spain,
the most recent heir to King Phillip IV,
portrayed in her unsullied perfection. A
decade earlier, the king had lost his only
son and his first wife, so this child is proof
of the fertility of his new bride, his niece
Mariana of Austria. (When they married,
he was 51 and she was 15, and she had
once been the intended of the dead
prince.) With the dynasty teetering, the
little Infanta was one more heir to guar-
antee the royal line, and thus an obvious-
ly worthy subject for superlative paint-
ing. Margarita was also a valuable pawn
in the diplomatic marriage game, which
was how Spain built its empire and
forged alliances. In 21st-century terms,
the Infanta was the equivalent of a major
arms or trade deal, all but signed. This
portrait of her is also a picture of dynastic
and political capital.
The Infanta is suitably, regally attend-
ed by her ladies-in-waiting — the “menin-
as” of the title. And her all-time-great
portrait is appropriately set in one of the
royal apartments of the Alcazar palace,
hung wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling with
selections from the king’s collection of
pictures. Those works are the competi-
tion that Velazquez has to beat with “Las
Meninas.” And Velazquez depicts these
works as so dark that they’re entirely
outshone — by “Las Meninas” itself.
The renovation, decoration and re-
hanging of the royal Alcazar apartments
was supervised by Velazquez himself,
whose art had earned him the position of
king’s chamberlain. The Infanta, though
barely out of babyhood, is so eminent that
even this royal chamberlain — also the
official painter to the king — is in atten-
dance, there off to the left with his
brushes. He’s apparently in the middle of
painting this youngest member of the
royal family.
The royal subject and setting and mak-
er of “Las Meninas” are matched by its
glorious, and glorifying, execution. Its
sense of air and space, of light and
surfaces, is unrivaled. But instead of
spelling out every detail, as a lesser realist
might, Velazquez prefers vagueness,
from blurred fingers to the mysterious
flash of pink behind the Infanta’s right
wrist. He dutifully makes clear the
world’s illegibilities — a paradoxical goal
that’s worthy of the world’s greatest
painter.
Reproductions can barely hint at the
experience of actually standing in front of
the picture. It’s as though Velazquez had
deliberately set out to make a picture so
supremely powerful that it could com-
mand a pilgrimage from any art lover.
Engravings or descriptions — or in our
day, color photographs — are rendered
almost useless by the painting’s subtlety
and might.
“Las Meninas” seems to open up a hole
in the wall and invite you to cross
through. The king’s dog, lying at the
border between your world and the
painting’s, seems as large as life and right
there in arm’s reach, and the figures
behind him seem life-size, too. After re-
turning from Madrid, I asked David Stork
and Yasuo Furuichi, two scientists who
have built a digital model of the “Las
Meninas” scene in virtual 3-D, to confirm
my impression of the painting’s scale:
Running the numbers for the first time,
Furuichi discovered that the painting is
scaled at a nearly perfect 1:1. That kind of
round number doesn’t happen by acci-
dent: Velazquez calculated his painting
to feature life-size figures that speak
The little girl is the most recent
heir to King Phillip IV.
directly to your body as you look at them.
When you’re in front of the picture,
standing “alongside” its courtly crowd,
you also get a palpable sense of light
entering the Infanta’s space, pouring
through a window that’s just beyond
sight. It takes genius to use light to make
us feel a window we can’t even see. And
then we watch that light bounce from dog
fur to velvet, from silver embroidery to
silver tray, from the polished red of a
Mexican pot to the gold in a hair clip —
across all the necessary markers of luxury
and taste. And as the light bounces across
the room, we imagine Velazquez’s brush
EZ SU
DRAWING A CROWD: “Las Meninas” fills the better part of a wall at the far end of the Prado Museum’s most imposing gallery, and the room is often full.
flying across the canvas to portray that
sparkle: Light, and Velazquez, both re-
veal the world to us in all its glorious
particularity.
Space itself is among the subjects of
this painting. Its perspective lets us un-
derstand where all the walls stand, as
well as the layout of every object and
figure among them. In “Las Meninas,” the
accuracy of that scheme was testable by
all its courtly viewers, who’d hung out in
the room it depicted. The painting still
passes the same test: Surviving plans and
inventories of the Alcazar, which burned
down in 1734, show a perfect match
between what was really there and what
Velazquez showed.
All this virtuosic realism certainly
makes “Las Meninas” a truly great paint-
ing. It doesn’t come close to making it the
greatest ever. Its realism fulfills cliches of
excellence; Velazquez needs to reinvent
what excellence could be. He takes a base
of realism, and piles subtleties and con-
volutions on it.
‘The Theology of Painting’
The oldest comment about “Las Meni-
nas” comes a few decades after its mak-
ing, from the mouth of Luca Giordano, a
splashy Italian painter. Seeing the pic-
ture for the first time, he was said to have
proclaimed it “The Theology of Painting”
— as much ahead of other art as theology
is ahead of every other kind of knowl-
edge. And like a fine theologian, Ve-
lazquez leads us into depths that are
bafflingly deep.
The Infanta seems to be the subject of
this painting. But, as usual with “Las
Meninas,” if something seems to be, it
isn’t. Early on, the work was titled “Ve-
lazquez Painting the Portrait of an Infan-
ta,” but Margarita has her back to the
painter and he’s not even looking at her.
Most of the painting’s nine figures — even
the tiny man in the far background about
to leave the room — have their eyes glued
to a spot on our side of the canvas. The
only people who could command that
kind of rapt attention, even from the
Infanta and the king’s own painter, would
be the king and queen of Spain them-
selves. And there they are, glimpsed in a
mirror on the back wall behind their
favorite artist. We need to imagine them
standing pretty much where we are as we
take in “Las Meninas.”
So now we have to test a new story line
to explain what we see: The picture must
revolve around a moment when the roy-
als are passing through to get a peek at
Velazquez painting a portrait of their
daughter.
The Infanta and her retainers have all
turned from the artist to welcome her
parents — she and one of her meninas
seem about to launch into curtsies. The
slight figure at right, a court dwarf named
Nicolas Pertusato, prods the king’s dog to
wake up and acknowledge his master. In
the far distance by the room’s rear door,
Jose Nieto Velazquez, the queen’s cham-
berlain and a possible relation of the
painter’s, is preparing the way for the
royal couple’s passage out again. (An
Court dwarf named Nicolas
Pertusato prods the king’s dog.
KLMNO
The queen’s chamberlain stands
by the room’s rear door.
early source identifies almost every fig-
ure in the scene. Archival research has
yielded some other nice facts: for in-
stance, that the light-filled stairwell the
queen’s chamberlain is standing in was
Velazquez’s own addition to the palace.)
With this story line, we realize that
Velazquez has not merely captured a
portion of space. He’s frozen a moment in
time, and the passing flow of life. Show-
ing off yet again, he’s also made a painting
that’s all about the visit of a king and
queen but that barely lets us see them —
much as he gives us window light without
a window.
Or might the story line be more deco-
rous and formal than that, and more
regal? Maybe Velazquez isn’t working on
a portrait of the Infanta, even though
she’s front and center in the picture that’s
hanging on the wall at the Prado. Maybe
she’s the one who has stopped by, with her
little retinue, to watch her royal parents
sitting for the court painter. The mirror
doesn’t show the royals passing through,
but arrayed for the grandest of court
portraits, being recorded on the huge
canvas on the painter’s easel. And what’s
still more fun is that Velazquez makes
that couple us. As you look at this paint-
ing, you take the royals’ place on this far
side of the painter’s easel, just where they
would have stood as Velazquez painted
them. We observers look into the mirror
on the picture’s rear wall to check out
what we look like, but instead of seeing
our own lowly mugs, we see ourselves as
royalty.
Except that can’t be right, either. In
this painting, every time we think we’re
smart enough to know what’s going on,
Velazquez tells us he’s smarter still. Look-
ing deep into “Las Meninas” reveals that
the whole scene is being observed from
far over to its right. We’re not looking at
the room from its center, facing the
mirror; we’re facing its brightly lit rear
door. Which means that, if we’re not
looking at the mirror from in front but
from our skew position, then it can only
be reflecting something farther over yet
to the left. The faces we glimpse in the
mirror can’t be of a royal couple looking
at it; they can only be those painted royal
faces Velazquez has already set down on
his canvas, off to the mirror’s left.
Last year, when Stork and Furuichi
prepared their computer re-creation of
the painting’s space (first publicized in
these pages), they mapped out the layout
of all the objects and people in the room
in “Las Meninas.” That led them to dis-
cover that the easel and its canvas block
the view of the mirror to anyone standing
directly before it: The royals could never
have used it to see their own faces.
Through the looking glass
So now we’ve figured it out: “Las Meni-
nas” shows Velazquez painting a picture
of the royal couple. It’s a plausible read-
ing — and it gets things wrong, once
again, as all the others have. As we watch
Velazquez at work at his easel in “Las
Meninas,” his greatest painting and his
claim to ultimate artistic repute, the only
thing he could be painting is a picture of
himself.
If we’re looking at a painting by Ve-
lazquez and we see Velazquez in it (there
he is in “Las Meninas,” holding his brush-
es), then what else can it be but a self-por-
trait? It’s the latest in a line of paintings of
artists peeking past their easels as they
paint themselves.
And what are those artists always
peeking at? Their own view in a mirror,
obviously, or they couldn’t see to paint
their own portraits. So it turns out that, as
we look at “Las Meninas,” we’re not in the
position of its royal observers, as we
thought. We can only be in the position of
some big mirror that we imagine Ve-
lazquez using to study himself, with the
Infanta and her retinue looking on from
the side. (We know the Velazquez estate
included 10 mirrors, and Velazquez had
used lots more in his redecoration of the
Alcazar.) Standing before the picture at
the Prado, you can easily imagine that the
figures in the painting aren’t staring out
The man with the brush is, in
fact, Diego Velazquez.
at you; they’re staring at themselves.
Or maybe we shouldn’t think of our-
selves as standing in front of this scene at
all, whether as its royals or as Velazquez’s
mirror. What is in a mirror is always seen
from the viewpoint of the person looking
into it. That means Velazquez has put
anyone standing in front of his painting
into his own shoes, while he portrays
himself.
When we stand looking at “Las Menin-
as” at the Prado, we see what Velazquez
saw in that mirror, as he stood at his easel
laying down an image of himself and
everything around him. In other words,
the mirror view that’s sitting on his easel
has to be identical to that glorious mirror
view we know as “Las Meninas.”
You could say that Velazquez, art’s
magician, allows his picture to be in two
places, and two eras, at once: It is the real
finished canvas whose front we’re exam-
ining, as we gaze in wonder at the illu-
sions produced by “Las Meninas” in 2010;
it is also the fictional picture, still in
progress, whose back we see sitting on its
easel in a room at the Alcazar in 1656.
If only it were that simple. (As your
courtship of this painting starts clocking
up the hours, you start wishing you were
dealing with some easygoing genius such
as Michelangelo, van Gogh or Duchamp.)
Didn’t we say that the view in the
mirror that hangs on the back wall could
only be of a fancy royal portrait sitting on
the painter’s easel? And if it’s those royals
The king and queen are seen in a
mirror’s reflection.
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 24, 2010
THOMAS STRUTH
that Velazquez is brushing onto his can-
vas, how can he also be depicting him-
self?
And there’s still another reason why
“Las Meninas” can’t present Velazquez
portraying himself and his surroundings,
much as we might prefer that simple
solution. We decided, early on, that we’re
staring at this palace hall from some-
where in front of its brightly lit rear door.
And that, of course, is nowhere near
where Velazquez is standing as he paints,
over at far left. If he were truly rendering
this scene from a mirror set in front of
him (as we presume he must be, to paint
his own portrait), the picture he is work-
ing at — “Las Meninas” itself — would
show its scene to us from that spot where
he is standing.
This is one more of this picture’s irre-
solvable contradictions, and like all the
others, it must be deliberate. It may also
carry meaning.
Maybe we need to think of Velazquez
as deliberately sidelined in the world that
he creates. And maybe he wants his entire
painting to read as a celebration of his
neutral view from that sideline, taking in
the passing world with an impartial eye.
You could say that Velazquez has built a
looking-glass universe where he’s at the
center of that instant, sidelong looking:
He’s off to the side, but he’s also bigger
than anyone else in the painting, and in
some sense is its central subject. (He’s the
only person in it really doing much of
anything.)
Velazquez is letting us in on the exem-
plary realist moment, where a great
painter gives his all to capture the single
view that sits before his eyes — basically,
it’s the moment of the live portrait sketch,
which was a Velazquez specialty. By using
the format and manner of a grand history
painting — the kind of painting normally
reserved for great moments in war or
religion — he turns his humble scene of a
painter at work into a kind of apotheosis
of portraiture. The artist’s glance can
change the world and redraw boundaries
as much as a miracle or battle would.
The true subject of “Las Meninas” is
the heroic moment of its own making,
recorded “live,” in a real place, as no
history painting had ever been before. We
might want to change the title to “The
Immaculate Reflection” — it is the “mir-
ror of nature” that theorists had long
asked painting to be.
One other thing: “Las Meninas,” the
greatest realist painting by the greatest
realist painter, can’t have ever had much
to do with the realistic, portraitlike mo-
ment it touts. For all its hard-won snap-
shot feel, the picture must have taken
months to make, with trips up and down
a ladder to get to its top.
Paradox piled on contradiction piled
on impossibility. The confusion has to be
on purpose: Velazquez, the great realist
painter setting out to show what the
greatest painting ever might really look
like, has decided that to be truly great, it
needs to surpass any single reading we
might use to pin it down.
“Las Meninas” is a painting that keeps
10 balls in the air at once — more than
enough to keep an art critic scratching
notes onto his pad for days in a row, and
wishing at the end that there were more
days of scratching ahead. Part of its point
is to show how much more unendingly
fertile it is than any mind that takes it in.
Velazquez labored to make “Las Meni-
nas” the ultimate puzzle-picture. (It
didn’t get that way by accident.) And that
head-scratching is balanced by the beau-
ty of untroubled realism — by the com-
forting perfections this story started out
describing.
Paradox starts feeling like the normal
state of things.
gopnikb@washpost.com
on washingtonpost.com
To see a small selection of readings
6 from various painters, philosophers
and scholars sparked by Diego
Velazquez’s “Las Meninas,” visit
washingtonpost.com/style.
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Arts&Style sunday, november 14 , 2010 KK AX FN FS LF PW DC BD PG AA FD HO MN MS SM

RECORDINGS B L O G S A N D C H AT S wa s h i n g t o n p o s t . c o m /s t yle T H EAT E R

Springsteen outtakes Quick study
Songs that didn’t On Love For this couple, saving the sex for after marriage was the right choice. E10 Nine days before press
make “Darkness on opening, Eleasha
the Edge of Town”
Carolyn Hax This parent will pay for the wedding — if the daughter waits till age 25. E11 Gamble was handed the
see the light. E12 lead role in Arena’s
Ask Amy, E8 Celebrations, E11 Cul de Sac, E12 Movie Guide, E9 Horoscope, E9 Lively Arts Guide, E4 “Oklahoma!” E7

Face it: Facebook

is ugly. Shouldn’t
something seen so
often be beautiful?
We demand a
makeover.

acelift. by Blake Gopnik

It’s a safe bet that no image in history has

been viewed as many times, as intently, as the
basic Facebook page. The company claims that
its 500 million users spend more than 10 billion
hours every month looking at that blue-and-
gray Web site. In her five centuries of existence,
Mona Lisa has not been ogled as much. She
must be jealous.
She shouldn’t be. Popularity is one thing;
beauty is another. No matter how many friends
Facebook may have offered up to you, the truth
is that your page is ugly.
Look at it: Do its standard grays and blues
make you think or feel anything at all? They
have all the charisma of a checkbook. Stand a
few feet back from your computer screen, and
try to describe the gestalt of the design you see.
You’ll find almost nothing there worth notic-
ing. Just a bunch of postage-stamp photos skit-
tering around a gridded-up page, like the fall-
ing doodads in a Tetris game.
At very best, the Facebook page is utterly
nondescript. No one surfing to it by accident
would say, “Wow, I’d better look at what this
page has to offer.” But doesn’t creating the
most-seen image, ever, come with a certain aes-
ILLUSTRATION BY MARK ALLEN MILLER FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Elevating form and function:
A redesigned Facebook page, E5.
thetic responsibility?
Adam Mosseri, a design manager at Face-
book, isn’t sure it does. “We actually spend a lot
of time designing the lack of presence,” he says.
“Would we want people to come to Facebook
and say, ‘This is something beautiful,’ or ‘This is
something well executed’? I do think there’s a
lot of room for improvement in the visual ex-
ecution, but I can’t imagine us aiming for that.”
He draws an analogy to composing music for

facebook continued on E5

MUSIC

What a 27-time Grammy winner has to teach

“Youngblood, you gotta . . .” Jones re-
calls them saying as he sits at a corner ta-
Quincy Jones tells ble in the bar lounge at the Ritz-Carlton in
future musicians Northwest Washington. Jones has come
to look to the past to town to promote his new book, “Q on
Producing.” In the book — the first of
three in “The Quincy Jones Legacy Se-
by DeNeen Brown

“Youngblood,” the jazz greats would

ries,” written with Bill Gibson — Jones dis-
penses advice to a younger generation,
which he says doesn’t seem to understand
Robin Givhan
whisper in whiskey-smooth voices to a
young Quincy Jones, “step into my office.”
The office could have been a backstage
its music history or recognize its musical
heroes.
The book is Jones’s “step into my office”
A tuxedo on a
hallway anywhere with musicians prac-
ticing bebop. Or a juke joint in downtown
Seattle, where Billie Holiday had to be
lesson for younger musicians.
“I talk a lot now,” he says, “but I used to
sit down, shut up and listen.”
woman: Breaking
helped onstage. The office might have
been a jazz club corridor with broken
lights and a 17-year-old Ray Charles, who
Jones was only 14 in 1947 when he
joined a jazz band in Seattle. Throughout
his career, there was always someone old-
society’s rules and
“might as well have been 100 because he
had his own girlfriend and apartment.”
The office might have been a seat on a bus BILL O’LEARY/WASHINGTON POST
er on the scene to “school” Jones.
Jones pauses. Ice cubes clink in glasses
at the bar. “Count Basie practically adopt-
fashion’s stereotypes.
traveling with the Lionel Hampton Band.
In the “office,” the older musicians
LATEST PROJECTS: Jones has a
new book, “Q on Producing,” and new
ed me when I was 13. I would play hooky
Page E2
would educate Jones about music and life. album, “Q: Soul Bossa Nostra.” music continued on E3

M
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SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2010
Facebook’s deliberately nondescript design
facebook from E1
films: “The best score is the score that
you don’t notice, that complements the
movie experience. When you start to no-
tice the score, it’s distracting, and that’s
a bad thing.”
It’s the standard function-over-form
argument, and it’s not without its mer-
its. But it doesn’t have to lead to design
that’s simply absent, or asleep. Classic
modernist buildings — or Apple’s elec-
tronics — can work well and look great
at the same time. Their look actually
helps us marvel at their functionality —
a big difference from the drabness of
Facebook.
Every time an object or image gets
produced, “artistic” choices unavoidably
get made — and those choices should al-
ways fall on the side of visual signifi-
cance. Every object we see ought to rec-
ognize its duty to make seeing a better,
more important experience. Looking
good is a crucial function of every man-
made thing out there. No design is “just”
about what it does, in terms of clicking
or spinning or getting us from A to B. Ev-
ery visible object is also, in its essence,
something to be looked at — a work of
art, at least in utero.
A speedy lawnmower — or Web site —
that looks ugly is precisely half as func-
tional, in the full terms of being an ob-
ject in the world, as one that works
equally well and is a joy to look at.
Which leaves Facebook functioning less
than half as well as it could.
This matters, because the image Face-
book presents isn’t tucked away, like
that checkbook in your drawer or the
hard drive inside your PC. We don’t
glance at it to get elsewhere, as we do
with Google. It is a virtual living room
where we spend hour after hour with
our “friends” — and it might as well be
decorated with an “Employee of the
Month” display from your local savings
and loan.
Efficient ugliness?
“What we’re trying to do is just make
it really efficient for people to communi-
cate, get information and share infor-
mation. We always try to emphasize the
utility component,” said Mark Zucker-
berg, Facebook’s founder, in a Time
magazine Q&A.
Mosseri, his designer, also emphasiz-
es the company’s favoring of function
over look. “We’re a very small part of the
team,” he says. “There are upwards of
600 engineers at Facebook, and there
are 18 product designers. And we are the
only representatives of the aesthetic.”
(Post Co. Chairman Donald E. Graham
is on the board of Facebook.)
But in fact Facebook doesn’t feel
strictly undesigned and utilitarian, the
way the Google home page does. Face-
book has almost too many visual flour-
ishes: Those nesting boxes in varied
blues at the top of each page; all those
hairlines, single and double, boxing-in
data and fields; the little dingbats that
stand for friends acquired, comments
made, links posted and, of course, posts
“liked.”
All this busywork functions as deco-
ration — but only in the way the paint
job in a doctor’s office does. It is “visual
thinking” — one definition of art and de-
sign — but with a dunce cap on. Those
dingbats look they’ve come straight out
of clip art. The blues and grays are stan-
dard corporate crud. (Mosseri says they
may have derived, initially, from his
boss’s colorblindness. The site has been
blue since before Zuckerberg hired his
first designer.) The trademark no-caps
font of the “facebook” logo is so generic,
so nearly characterless, that it could as
easily say “instafund” or “pharmaweb.”
Google’s home page — Facebook’s ob-
vious competition for “most-viewed im-
age” status — is also about function rul-
ing form. But at least it makes function
its true design principle, in classic mod-
ernist style. The standard Google home
page is basically a box to ask a question,
a list of places to get it answered and a
button to launch your search. On a
white background. (The actual Google
logo is hardly good typography, but all
that white around it keeps it in its place.)
The principle that less is more is a de-
sign gesture in itself. It may be a bit
stale, but it’s still workable.
The Facebook page has neither ges-
ture nor principle. It’s just there, like the
buzz of your computer’s hard drive.
Stephen Doyle, an industry leader
who was presented with the National
Design Award for communication de-
sign at the White House last summer, is
willing to cut the site some slack. Mak-
ing the old function-over-form argu-
ment, he said that “sometimes the job of
design is just to get you safely across the
road. . . . If [Facebook] had a real wowy
design, I think we’d say, ‘Get out of here,
Facebook.’ ” He referred to the site as “a
kind of cellophane container” for all the
homely stuff its users stick in it. “It’s
hard to design when you have absolute-
ly no control over the content.”
But then, studying the site more
closely with his design professor’s hat
on, he finds that cellophane to be messy
and covered in gunk. “All those little
“We actually spend time designing the
lack of presence. Would we want people
to say, ‘This is something beautiful,’ or
‘This is something well-executed’?
— Adam Mosseri, Facebook design manager
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icons through the text are pretty darn
annoying, and you want to brush them
away,” he says. He’s also not a fan of the
boxes and lines that clutter the page:
“It’s very noisy. It could be streamlined.”
As for Facebook’s color choices, “the
The case for a better Facebook
world’s favorite color is blue . . . to me Paddy Harrington is creative director of Bruce Mau Design. A longtime Facebook user, he
that means that [good design] should be voiced reservations about the site’s design in a phone call from his office in Toronto. This is a
not-blue” — it should distinguish itself,
rather than sooth us into a coma. condensed version of what he had to say.
If Facebook is really a vehicle for its
users’ identities, Doyle wonders, “why I’ve been a member [of Facebook] for a by 720 pixels? havior, you’re quickly subsumed into the
does my Facebook page look the same as while. And I’m trying to figure out how to I open up my Facebook page, and I see experience, without seeing the visual ex-
your Facebook page? Why doesn’t my get away from it. I think it’s truly akin to this news stream, and I see people I know pression of the thing at all.
Facebook have a fake-wood surround? trying to break an addiction. And I mean giving me little surprises that are com- It’s utilitarian, it’s functional, it has
. . . Your image choice is completely dif- that in the most serious way. pletely meaningless. I don’t really care kind of given up on how it looks. It’s basi-
ferent from mine, so why do we both I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the that “chicken-noodle soup stinks.” But cally a series of windows through which
have a blue box on our page?” neurotransmitter dopamine, and, for me, somehow it rewards me at some basic you can experience the content. It’s a Web
Those blue boxes, and all the visual it’s sort of like the design of the [Face- neurological level, because it’s a new site designed by engineers.
noise they bathe in, end up having an book] page itself is purely driven by the piece of information that’s related to People say that design is how it works,
important effect, he says. “Which shoes act of trying to promote the act of seek- someone I know. So it triggers a reward, not how it looks. Well, I think that [Face-
you’re wearing always changes how you ing, and seeking is all about delivering but it’s a completely empty reward. book] is that in the purest sense. The
stand, and how you feel.” Facebook’s small surprises, which trigger dopamine, If you look at the development of Face- problem is, the “how-it-looks” part is a
home page is wearing tennis shoes, which puts people into this happy, hazy book pages, with each [redesign], they’re key delivery mechanism for any responsi-
Doyle says, “with Velcro. It’s probably place where they feel comfortable. But ul- just compressing the number of new up- ble design practice.
time to change them.” timately, it’s really detrimental. It has the dates that are visible on one page. But what you’re finding here is an utter
same kind of effect as cocaine and am- If you were to look at [a Facebook page] disregard for that.
‘The purest form of evil’ phetamines. strictly speaking as a graphic design exer- I think the motivation really is about
Here’s a really spooky observation: No So, for me, it’s almost like Facebook is cise, then absolutely it’s [bad]. But it feels refining and distilling the act of seeking,
one seems to notice. an optimized dopamine trigger system. as though it’s impossible for me to read it which for me is what makes Facebook the
The massive Design and Applied Arts How do you get as many little surprises, that way, because the design has become most brilliant or the most evil graphic de-
Index, which searches more than 500 and promote the act of seeking, in as high invisible to the function of the site. [Face- sign experience that exists today. It’s one,
magazines and journals, doesn’t yield a a concentration as possible, within 1280 book] is so much about an addictive be- or the other.
single article about Facebook’s design.
When Doyle did his Facebook critique
for us, you could feel that even he, one of
the country’s top designers, had never
really looked at the site that popped up
every time he checked his feed.
Back to the drawing board
It’s almost as though, in the process of We invited Bruce Mau Design, a firm famous for its conceptual ambition, to reimagine what a Facebook
using Facebook, our eyes and mind
don’t even notice it’s there. page might be. To signal that they were aiming at more than a cosmetic redo, BMD’s design director Paddy
“Social networking should be de- Harrington and his team left many of Facebook’s graphic details intact. Instead, they took a stab at some
signed to help people connect without
feeling that a layer of technology stands new functionality, reflecting their ideal vision of a social networking site.
in the way,” writes Bill Moggridge, direc-
tor of the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt
design museum, in a book called “De- What’s up, doc?
signing Media” that was published last This is what you get when you click on the image of one of your friends. It’s the BMD version of the Facebook “wall,” more or less, but
month. (See sidebar to read more of his with more of an accent on photos than text. You see only a few “updates” at once, to fend off addiction.
defense of Facebook’s design.)
Moggridge might be right, if we lived
in some ideal, Vulcan-mind-meld world
where true transparency could be
achieved. If we really couldn’t see the
Facebook page, an art critic could hardly
complain about its looks. Down here on
Earth, however, every time we “just”
want to use an object, we also have no
choice but to take in its visuals. With
Facebook, the kind of “transparency”
that Moggridge imagines seems just an-
other word for corporate blandness.
There is a complex visual interface in-
volved with using Facebook, but the goal
is to keep us from caring about it — and
getting us to care is one feature of any
decent work of art, or of any object that
stops to consider its own place in the
world.
Or maybe the point is that, if we don’t
care too much about Facebook’s design,
its content gets a free pass, too. You
could say that Facebook’s mind-numb-
ing design is meant to keep us numb to
fussy distinctions such as those between
“friends” and friends, or between “lik-
ing” and liking.
I wouldn’t be the first to feel that
there’s something chilling about Face-
book’s ability to cloud our minds so we
barely even see the screen we’re looking
at. “I am absolutely convinced that Face-
book is the purest form of a certain kind
of evil that we have in our collective cul-
ture right now,” says Paddy Harrington,
design director of Bruce Mau Design,
one of the world’s most prominent and
forward-looking firms. (Culture-savvy
clients have included Disney Hall in Los
Angeles and the Museum of Modern Art
in New York, as well as Zone Books.)
Harrington says he’s been a heavy
Facebook user, and is trying to kick a
habit he likens to drugs or nicotine. The Your real friends Hunting for details Keeping in touch
site, he says, feeds you little doses of in- This grid provides images only of “the The numbers by your friends’ pictures This is the heart of the BMD redesign. It
formation about your so-called people you most want to keep in touch tell you how many updates they’ve invites you to come into real (or at least
“friends,” one at a time, until you can’t with and care most about,” Harrington posted since you last took a look. The virtual) contact with the people you
seem to do without those snippets of says. The rest of the page is about color of those numbers might signal care about. The picture would change
data. “[Facebook] is so much about an contacting them. what form those updates take: videos, to reflect what your friends are up to
addictive behavior, you’re quickly sub- links, photos, etc. But you have to when you try to make a connection;
sumed into the experience, without see- choose which friends you want to some friends might even choose to
ing the visual expression of the thing at check in on, one by one. Their updates make this a live feed from a webcam.
all,” Harrington says. (You can read his don’t all pour in automatically. Or it might be up to you to initiate the
attack at length in this article’s sidebar.) contact — by voice, video or text — by
Facebook, he says, has “become less clicking on one of the buttons below.
about my friends, and more about the Then, if you’re turned down, at least
experiences of my friends. . . . In some you know who your real friends are.
ways I don’t even care who they are or
what they’re saying — I just need that
small reward” — the reward of getting
something, anything, out of those
friends, one update at a time. You don’t
go to Facebook, that is, for the quality of
its content. You head there for its quan-
tity and its never-ceasing supply, reli-
ably delivered, almost like a morphine
What Facebook is doing right
drip, by its generic design. Bill Moggridge is the newly appointed director of the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National
Any really fine design — any image at Design Museum, and a leading authority on interactive design. Moggridge spoke about the
all worthy of the eyes of half a billion
viewers — would aim for more than social networking site from his office in New York. Here is some of what he said.
soporific neutrality. It would try to wake
its viewers up to the thrills that can The thing that matters [in Facebook] is tion that is extremely laid-back and mod- Whereas design is really about solving a
come with looking. the way you navigate. The satisfaction est, and not at all what you would think problem that makes something more
gopnikb@washpost.com that you get, in terms of the design of the was visual for its own sake. And I think pragmatic, and useful, and valuable or val-
interactive behavior, is in how it allows Facebook learned something from that. ued, and of course you can add qualities of
you to go back and forward, and get to the What I’m saying is that the design of the aesthetics to that, that make it also a de-
ON WASHINGTONPOST.COM To add information you want, and not feel in- interactive behavior needs to be the most light. At the same time, if it fails on the
your opinion about Facebook’s design, terrupted by the two-dimensional presen- important thing if the interactive behav- functionality side, all is lost, whereas if it
go to washingtonpost.com/style. tation. So I think the 2-D works best [on- ior itself is the most important thing — fails on the delight side, it might still fit
line] when it’s actually a little laid-back which it clearly is with Facebook. Face- into a lot of people’s lives in a satisfactory
and rather distinguished, perhaps — not book, in order for it to deal with all that if not an exciting way.
too aggressive, and trying to focus on the
things that you can do in a behavioral
complexity of behavior, needs to be de-
signed in a way that’s relatively subtle.
The visual quality may be something
that could be very modest, and still be en-
sense.
Google fascinates people because of its
And perhaps that’s a good excuse for it not
being obviously visually full of personality.
tirely appropriate. You could even say that
of Craigslist. Although it’s the most hor-
behavioral performance — the fact that
you can put in your request, and you can
One of the big differences between art
and design is that art is mostly about com-
ribly boring typographic exercise you’ve
seen in your life, the fact that [Craig New-
go to what they recommend, and you’re
usually satisfied with that. That’s an in-
mentary — it’s making a statement that
you’re expecting other people to con-
mark] wants to express that he’s just got a
list, and that list is very useful to people, is
credible technical achievement, but I template and be moved by, emotionally, or something that has a design quality about
think it’s supported by a visual presenta- altered by, in terms of their perceptions. it.
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“
T H E T V C O LU M N T V PREVIEW
NBC’s ambitious MTV’s Likable ‘Hired’ Very strong
fall shakeup The new series follows recent college grads on job interviews. C6
“Heroes” (right) bites the lead, easy
dust, and the network is to follow.”
adding six one-hour TV
series, one half-hour Bob Ryan’s blue skies — Karen McLane on her dance-floor turn
comedy and a new reality The weatherman, moving from Channel 4 to with Tom DeLay (right), which she won in
series in the fall. C5 Channel 7, says he’s excited by the change. C2 a charity auction. Reliable Source, C2

3 LIVE TODAY @ washingtonpost.com/discussions Media Backtalk with Howard Kurtz Noon OnLove: Dating advice for single women 1:30 p.m.

The other site of the Swann St. crime

As three men go on trial,
four others feed fascination
with the case on the Web
by Neely Tucker
Once upon a time, when people be-
came fascinated with criminals or serial
killers or sensational murder trials, they
hung out at the courthouse all day, then
they wrote books about it all.
BILL O’LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST
The Lindbergh kidnapping, “The
AT THE SCENE: Three of the four men behind the Who Murdered Robert Crime of the Century,” was in 1932, and
Wone? Web site, from left: Craig Brownstein, Doug Johnson and David Greer. people are still writing books about it.
Truman Capote and “In Cold
Blood” in the 1960s. Ann Rule
and her tale of Ted Bundy, “The
Stranger Beside Me,” in the
1980s. Dominick Dunne? Made
a career out of this sort of thing
with Vanity Fair.
Now it’s 2010, and we bring
you a Web site called Who Mur-
dered Robert Wone? (www. Victim Robert
whomurderedrobertwone.com) Wone with his
— a new-media instant encyclo- wife, Kathy.
pedia of the ongoing investiga-
tion and prosecution (though not on
murder charges) of the mysterious slay-
ing of Wone, a Washington lawyer.
It’s the slightly obsessive brainchild of
Craig Brownstein, 52, vice
president for media relations at
the Edelman public relations
firm; Doug Johnson, 45, a pro-
ducer at Voice of America; Mi-
chael Kremin, 53, a digital-
media consultant; and David
Greer, 45, a speechwriter at the
National Association of Real-
tors. Struck by the lack of cov-
erage of the case in 2008, they
set up the site as a simple blog
and watched it balloon into an
after-hours project so in-depth they are
hiring an intern to help cover the trial.
site continued on C9

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POSTMAS
TERS GAL
LERY, N
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THERE FOR THE TAKING? Eva and Franco Mattes spent two years appropriating parts of works
from top-flight artists (and documenting the thefts) to create their installation now on view in New York.

THIS WORK IS A STEAL! aquarium in which Jeff Koons floated his famous basketballs in
by Blake Gopnik Couple literally chipped away 1985. There’s a short length of shoelace from a Claes Oldenburg
soft sculpture. There’s a little blob of lead from an installation
in new york
at the creations of other artists by Joseph Beuys, and a couple of threads from an Andy Warhol.

A
dress made of raw meat? A cut-up shark in formalde-
hyde? A doorway made of naked bodies?
Yawn.
It’s not easy to impress an art critic these days.
So how about a piece of contemporary art that con-
sists of fragments stolen from priceless major modern works?
My head’s still spinning.
On Saturday evening, in the back room at Postmasters Gal-
lery in Chelsea, veteran dealer Magdalena Sawon gave me an
early glimpse of a work called “Stolen Pieces,” which she said
has never been exhibited. Made by a young Italian couple, Eva
and Franco Mattes, but kept secret since the mid-’90s, it con-
sists of a display case full of tiny chips from significant works of
art, snatched or snapped off by the duo over a two-year crime
spree. The artists did the deeds between July 28, 1995, and July
29, 1997, in museums all around the world.
The loot includes a manufacturer’s label peeled from the
Perhaps most significantly, there’s a tiny chip of porcelain from
the urinal “Fountain” of Marcel Duchamp, taken from an un-
specified exhibition.
The artists also claim to have lifted bits from works by Kan-
dinsky and Rauschenberg. Sawon says the piece is being un-
veiled now because the statute of limitations has run out on its
thefts.
art review continued on C10

Why Nashville flood coverage was a national news washout

CNBC and Fox News in New York, thinks he
knows why.
“On that side of the Hudson, they really
lose sight of the rest of the country,” says
Sellers, who grew up in Kentucky. “They
view it as flyover country. . . . There’s just a
feeling among folks here, ‘Look at what the
HOWARD KURTZ national media are talking about, they’re
not giving any attention to this.’ ”
administration too slow in reacting to the
offshore explosion? Why didn’t federal
regulators crack down earlier on BP? How
could a permit have been issued when the
company had no real plan for stopping an
oil spill?
And: Why was Faisal Shahzad allowed to
board that plane even though he was on the
no-fly list? Should the feds have read him
VINCENT KESSLER/REUTERS

Media Notes Valerie Plame, Queen Noor and “Countdown to

The reasons are more complicated — and his Miranda rights? Were we just lucky that
Zero” director Lucy Walker.
troubling — than Music City’s distance from he was a bumbling bombmaker?

A
s Nashville anchor Bob Sellers
watched his city submerged and spent
time helping colleagues whose homes
were utterly ruined, he was struck by how
the disaster remained a largely local story.
More than 30 people were killed in the
Tennessee flooding, but there was no
journalistic invasion to chronicle the
misery. And Sellers, who has worked for
the big media centers. Downtown Nashville By contrast, the Nashville story involved
was unfortunate enough to be under water
while the news business was grappling with
two other dramatic stories: the attempted
the all-too-familiar tale of a monster flood,
even though it was a once-in-a-lifetime
event for middle-class areas such as
At Cannes:
bombing in Times Square and the massive
Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
Each, of course, raised a bewildering
Bellevue. But try telling that to folks in
Tennessee. Their view is that nobody died in
Times Square.
Valerie Plame,
array of questions that could be endlessly
debated by the pundits. Was the Obama media notes continued on C3 on screen. Page C3
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C10 R KLMNO MONDAY, MAY 17, 2010

KidsE
FRAZZ JEF MALLETT

TODAY: Showers
HIGH LOW

61 52
ILLUSTRATION BY JACOB
ROBERTS, AGE 5, OAKTON

Just under 50 million students were enrolled in public schools this year from pre-K to 12th grade.

BIRTHDAYS
of the week

MONDAY 17
DEPOTO Ashburn’s Jeremy Hughes (2003).
Centreville’s Brittney Depoto (1999).
Gainesville’s Abigail Mumma (1997).
TUESDAY 18
Bryans Road’s Gary Warner Jr. (2004).
Mitchellville’s Daylon Alexander (2002).
Washington’s Imiloa Borland (2002).
WARNER
Fairfax’s Meghna Vemuri (2002).
Falls Church’s Cathleen Gavin (2000).
Potomac’s Elijah Mitchell (2000).
Rockville’s Judah Fredman (1999).
Bethesda’s Mackenzie Hickey (1998).
Potomac’s Brian Kilner (1998).
WEDNESDAY 19
HICKEY
Annandale’s Joe Hall (2003). Alexandria’s
Scott Burns (2001). Herndon’s Meriel
Carney (2001). Crofton’s Jack Weinman
(2001). Leesburg’s Jordan Murphy (2000).
Arlington’s Dallas Polk (1999). Ellicott City’s
Maria Packard (1997).
HALL
THURSDAY 20
Manassas’s Addison Dangler (2004).
Bristow’s Kyle VanDenburg (2004). Temple
Hills’ Xavier Ingram (2002). Ashton’s Payson
Lunden (2002). South Riding’s Matthew
Faber (1999).
CARNEY
FRIDAY 21
Herndon’s Jed Burke (2003). Alexandria’s
Sarah Innis (1999).
SATURDAY 22
Springfield’s Maria Derynioski (2002).
Hyattsville’s Marcus Ford (1999).
POLK
SUNDAY 23
Oxford, Pennsylvania’s Sadie Nardozzi
(2003). Damascus’s Nate Reinhold (2001).
Chevy Chase’s Derek Oliwa (2000). Ashton’s
Maeve Lunden (1999). Vienna’s Danny
Crowley (1998).
FORD
Birthday announcements are for ages 6 to 13 and are
printed on a first-come, first-served basis. They
must be submitted by an adult. We need photos at
least two months ahead of publication. Don’t forget to
include name, address and birth date (including year
of birth). Send to kidspost@washpost.com or KidsPost,
The Washington Post, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington,
D.C. 20071.
REINHOLD
I
t’s coming . . . summertime! Weeks
and weeks off! Time to play all day,
build forts outside, host sleepovers
MUMMA
and hang out at the pool. But sum-
mertime as you know it hasn’t always
been the norm. In the early
1800s kids attended school
year-round. But because it
wasn’t mandatory, mean-
ing you had to go to school,
VEMURI
most kids didn’t go daily.
In 1852, under the influence
of education reformer Horace
Mann, who is today referred to as
“the father of American public school
education,” Massachusetts became the
KILNER
first state to make schooling for kids
mandatory. The District of Columbia
came second in 1864. By 1918, all the
states required that kids attend school.
But early in the 20th century, doctors
started worrying that too much school
BURNS was too hard for kids and that attending
school in the summer heat was un-
healthful. Plus, kids living on farms were
expected to help with chores, and many
families ( just like today) enjoyed vaca-
tioning in the summertime.
WEINMAN
Hurray! Summer vacation was born.
Some people, including President Ba-
s EVER WONDERED rack Obama, think that more school
would be good. In a lot of countries, stu-
why you get the summer off ? dents go to school more than you. Most
American kids go to school 180 days a
year. Japanese kids go to school more
PACKARD than anyone — 243 days.
Changing the public school calendar,
however, is controversial, meaning peo-
ple have different ideas about it. Some
people think added or longer school days
could help you learn more and prepare
NARDOZZI you better for being an adult. Other peo-
ple like the idea of giving you time off to
relax and be creative.
Don’t worry, though, nothing will
change for this summer break, so enjoy!
— Moira E. McLaughlin
CROWLEY
THE WASHINGTON POST

A case of artistic larceny that’s not necessarily grand

art review from C1

A clandestine video shows the then-21-

year-olds completing their final theft —
of a tiny chip of burnt material from one
of Alberto Burri’s famous “Combustion”
paintings — from the Museum of Modern
Art in Bologna, Italy. The artists also pro-
vide before-and-after stills of some of the
works of art they altered during their
game of Grand Theft Museum.
“Stolen Pieces” doesn’t look like much,
just a bunch of scraps, for the most part
unrecognizable. Among the few things
you can actually make out are a speedom-
eter from one of the crushed cars of the
French artist César and a bottle cap from
an installation by the American Edward
Kienholz. The bottle cap is the trophy
from the Italians’ very first theft, before
they had fully decided that it would also
count as their first work of art. (They
went on to be major figures in the world
of Web art, working under the famous
alias 0100101110101101.org.)
‘Tribute,’ not ‘vandalism’
Franco Mattes said Sunday that the
artists’ intention when they began “Sto-
len Pieces” 15 years ago was “absolutely
not vandalism. I thought it was the great-
est tribute I could ever pay to these art-
ists.
“I loved them,” he added. “We thought
we were giving new life to these works —
bringing them back to life from the grave
of the museum.”
“Stolen Pieces” may not look that
great, but like so much of the work made
in the 20th century — like so much art,
ever — “Stolen Pieces” gets its force from
the questions it raises.
Here are a few I can’t get out of my
head:
G Did these artists’ tiny thefts much af-
fect the works they stole from? Does it
really matter that one of Kienholz’s big
junk piles is minus one bottle cap? How
many of these museums’ visitors would
have ever noticed or been touched by the
alterations?
G Does “Stolen Pieces” finally deflate the
old cliche that a true masterpiece is
something “from which nothing can be
taken and to which nothing can be added
without harm”? There’s hardly a single
work by an Old Master that doesn’t look
substantially different than it did when it
was fresh, and yet we still find plenty to
admire in them. (In fact, people objected
like crazy when Michelangelo’s Sistine
Chapel ceiling was returned to some
semblance of its original bright colors.)
G Originally, weren’t most of the target-
ed works themselves all about attacking
old-fashioned notions of the precious
THE SCENE OF A CRIME: Eva and Franco Mattes with one of Alberto Burri’s
“Combustion” paintings, from which they removed some burnt material.
work of art whose every detail deserves
to be worshipped? Before he became fa-
mous, Oldenburg let his viewers touch
and take away his ultra-sloppy works of
art. I can’t imagine that César could have
seen the speedometers on his crushed
cars as equivalent to so many brush-
strokes by Titian, to be preserved at any
cost. Did Beuys really treasure every blob
PHOTOS COURTESY POSTMASTERS GALLERY, NEW YORK
of metal scattered during one of his anti-
object performances?
G By making almost imperceptible alter-
ations to other works of art, Eva and
Franco Mattes have created a significant
new one. Does that leave the world of art
a richer place or a poorer one? (So long as
no other vandals follow in these artists’
footsteps, that is. But once the Matteses’
BIT BY BIT: The Matteses’ materials include bits taken (clockwise from top) from
Joseph Beuys, Robert Rauschenberg, Tom Wesselman and Edward Kienholz.
move has been made, there’s no reason
for anyone else to repeat it.)
In ‘improvement’ tradition?
G Great artists have often reworked and
overpainted and “improved” their pred-
ecessors’ works. Robert Rauschenberg
once erased a precious drawing by Wil-
lem de Kooning — with the latter’s per-
mission. Rubens famously retouched and
corrected the works by earlier masters in
his great drawing collection — long after
their makers were dead. Could the Mat-
teses’ acts be more of the same?
G In the case of Duchamp’s “Fountain,”
could it be that the Italians are actively
helping his art do its work? The Du-
champ urinals we now see in our mu-
seums are visibly handcrafted replace-
ments for his mass-produced industrial
original, which disappeared early on. By
pawning off a piece of handicraft, made
by a hired artisan, onto his collectors, I
think Duchamp was poking fun at any
fool who insisted on getting an “original”
Duchamp, instead of heading to their
neighborhood plumbing supplier. The
chip of porcelain in “Stolen Pieces” is an
extension of Duchamp’s chipping away at
precious art and its status as collectible
commodity.
G As budding radicals, it does seem as
though Eva and Franco Mattes wanted to
give the finger to the art world and art
history, with its hero worship, its vener-
ation of dead objects, its stale preciosi-
ties. But there’s nothing that “Stolen
Pieces” resembles so much as a holy reli-
quary from a medieval church — most of
whose objects were themselves stolen
from somewhere else, and then went on
to be chipped away at by pilgrims eager
for a piece of bone or holy cloth.
G The notion of a reliquary brings us to a
final, crucial question to be asked by any
visitor to “Stolen Pieces.” Is any of its
story true?
Sawon and her artists insist it is, and
there’s no special reason to doubt them.
On the other hand, with this kind of con-
temporary work, part of the point is that
there are never any certainties. Despite
the artists’ videos and photos, there’s a
chance that the whole display has been
doctored simply to get the art world riled
up.
But like a medieval pilgrim, I prefer to
conquer my doubts about the relics set
before me, so as not to lose my pleasure
in their contemplation.
They do leave me with at least one un-
shakable certitude. If I’d spotted these
artists messing with a work in a museum,
I’d have tackled them and called the cops.
gopnikb@washpost.com
Stolen Pieces
Is on display, along with new Web art by Eva and
Franco Mattes, at Postmasters Gallery, 459 W.
19th St., New York, through June 19. Extensive
documentation is available at
www.postmastersart.com.

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“
B O O K WO R L D THE RELIABLE T H E T V C O LU M N CA R O LY N H AX
SOURCE Arrested ‘Unfair’ life?
A paean to the Gift etiquette A man accused of When life hands you
restorative powers of President Obama’s issuing “warnings” to a bad deal, what to
gifts to the British “South Park’s” do? One suggestion
a quiet drink at the end of prime minister are creators (left) was is to extend your
the working day.” more savvy than last
year’s. C2
held on unrelated
charges. C4
own hand to help
others. C6
— Michael Dirda in his review of “The Hour.” C2

3 LIVE TODAY @ washingtonpost.com/discussions Got plans? Get great ideas from the Going Out Gurus 1 p.m. • Chat with the losing chef from Episode 6 of “Top Chef D.C.” 2 p.m.

A RT R E V I E W

Influenced by photography, the normally colorful artist

displays a black, white and gray side in MoMA exhibit

I, SPY

JASON MERRITT/GETTY IMAGES; WASHINGTON POST PHOTO ILLUSTRATION

Lights! Camera! Action figure!

Angelina Jolie is out to prove
she’s an actress worth her ‘Salt’
by Ann Hornaday

Settled serenely on an overstuffed couch at the Ritz-

Carlton in Georgetown, Angelina Jolie doesn’t look like
a woman who’s set out to rock the world.
Dressed in a short-skirted black suit, adorned only
by a knockout of an emerald ring, matching ear bobs
and a few inconspicuous tattoos, Jolie looks both un-
attainably gorgeous and improbably of-this-world. The
sculptural cheekbones and pillowy lips bear only the
most scant dusting of makeup (although it’s difficult to
fathom the reality of eyelashes that reach all the way to
Arlington). The fingernails, however, are cut short, de-
void of polish. The face may say Movie Star, but the
hands say Mother of Six.
That duality fits right in with “Salt,” the action spy
thriller opening Friday, in which Jolie plays a would-be
Russian sleeper spy of uncertain loyalties. In the
course of what amounts to a pulse-pounding 90-
minute chase from Washington to New York and back
again, Jolie gets to do a lot of things: jump, shoot, kick
the spit out of a cordon of broad-shouldered Secret
Service agents, dye her hair, dress in full-on dude drag.
But even in the midst of “Salt’s” most fantastical ac-
tion, hints of practicality peek through. Jolie might be
wearing towering nude heels in real life, but in the
movie the first thing Salt does is take off her pumps to
run. “There’s no way, running in heels,” Jolie says,
laughing at how often women in movies sprint down
streets in 41⁄2-inch Louboutins. “There was no way I
was going to do that!”
If “Salt” makes anything clear, it’s that the most su-
perhuman stunt Jolie performs in the movie can’t be
found in the over-the-top set pieces, or in her decep-

jolie continued on C3
SUCCESSION H. MATISSE/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY
SWIMMING IN DARKNESS: Henri Matisse’s “Goldfish and Palette,” from 1915, takes a cheerful subject and pours on
black, then “retouches” certain objects in color amid the scratchy mess of grays.

The Matisse
we don’t know by Blake Gopnik
ors they come near. They show us an artistic vision
that cuts up the world, flips it backward, reveals it in
in new york negative, then puts it back together with its seams
showing.

W
e know Henri Matisse. He is our favorite
poster artist. We love the pinks and
blues of his “Dance I” and how it turns
the world into a cheerful place. We love
the joyous arabesques of his “Red Room”
and the brightly colored cutouts of his “Jazz.” We’ve
put them in our nurseries. They are so bold and clear
that we can grasp them at a single glance.
A superb new exhibition at the Museum of Modern
Art, called “Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917,”
shows that the Matisse of our cliches is not the only
one. Its 109 works give us a Matisse who, at least for a
few years, made some of our toughest, most un-
compromising, most nearly ungraspable pictures.
They show us an artist of impenetrable blacks and
dirty whites, and of spreading grays that soil any col-
Most surprising, they reveal Matisse — that free
spirit who could imagine his way to any paradise he
pleased — slogging his way through the mud of every-
day photography. It’s not an argument the curators
make, but I believe this exhibition — sure to go down
as one of the greatest of our era — shows that this is
where Matisse went to get his blacks and whites, his
grayed-out colors, his reversals and revealed seams.
Even the brightest pictures in this show have a
‘Phantasmagoria’:
murky underside.
What better subject could there be for joyous Ma-
tisse-ifying than a goldfish in a sparkling bowl, set
A fantastic, wild dream
art review continued on C9 from Paul Taylor. Page C10
by sarah kaufman

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GRAY GHOSTS: “Bathers by a River” began as a colorful mural in 1909 and became something much tougher, and grayer, by
the time it was completed in 1917. The world has been dismantled, almost like photos cut up and pasted back together.

MoMA exhibit shows a Matisse

who’s not as easily recognizable
art review from C1

down beside a painter’s tools? Yet the as-

tounding 1915 painting now titled “Gold-
fish and Palette” has a huge slab of black
right down its middle, almost as if cross- SUCCESSION H. MATISSE/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY

ing out the pleasure its artist had taught TOUCH OF COLOR: “Woman on a High Stool” was painted in early 1914. Note
us to expect. The palette Matisse depicts the way its grays touched with color evoke the tones and hues of a hand-tinted
— the one we imagine being used in photograph, much like the tourist postcards we know Matisse owned.
painting the picture itself — is a scratchy
mess of grays. Even those poor fish are
edged in black, as though pulled from an
oil slick.
When Matisse’s “Bathers by a River”
started life, in 1909, it was as decoration
for a grand house in Moscow. He imag-
ined it as five nudes playing by a water-
fall, in pretty pinks and blues and greens.
By the time he declared it done, in 1916,
he had reworked the giant canvas to fea-
ture four figures like gray ghosts, barely
touched with flesh tones.
That same year, luscious oranges in a ARCHIVES HENRI MATISSE, PARIS/THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

crystal bowl become, in the hands of Ma-
tisse, more like embers glowing on ash-
es.
Even in printmaking, where paper-
white is the natural timbre, Matisse
managed to find a way to go dark. For
just the four years covered in this show,
he immersed himself in the new tech-
nique of the monotype — and used it to
produce 69 all-black rectangles, with
their subjects barely present, in nega-
tive, as a handful of white lines.
As for the pleasing legibility of
“Dance” or “Jazz,” it’s mostly absent from
this exhibition’s paintings. You must
work hard to figure out the worlds they
show.
In the poignant “Piano Lesson,” again
from 1916 — and another all-time-great
painting — a boy practices while a wom-
an looks on from a distance. Except that,
studying a drawing Matisse made of the
actual scene, you realize that you’re read-
ing her wrong: She wasn’t a she, but a
female portrait put up on the music
room’s back wall. (That very portrait,
now known as “Woman on a High Stool,”
is one of this show’s gems. Matisse
worked it and reworked it until it be-
came yet another masterpiece in gray,
with a bare few washes of color.) The al-
most vacant face of the piano player —
Matisse’s 16-year-old son, according to
the sketch — is split by an orange blaze.
We want to read it as a splash of sun but
it looks just as much like a wound. (Dur-
ing World War I, grossly disfigured
young men were pouring back from the
front.) The piano’s music stand is graced
with the word “Leyelp” — utter non-
sense, until you decipher it as the name
of the great French piano-maker Pleyel,
seen in reverse. Illegibility is almost this
painting’s signature gesture, spelled out
At Whitney Museum, a consistency in excellence
MoMA has been turning out
plenty of fine shows. Before the
splendors of Matisse there were
excellent ventures into Marina
Abramovic, Gabriel Orozco, the
Bauhaus, Aernout Mik and others.
It has also had its share of duds.
A New York institution that
seems to be pushing even further,
harder, more consistently has
been the Whitney Museum of
American Art. Its surveys of Gor-
don Matta-Clark, Dan Graham
and Roni Horn already feel like
landmarks in contemporary art.
Its roster right now is typical of
the Whitney’s pavement-to-roof
excellence.
The top floor has a show of the
sound artist Christian Marclay,
one of the best figures working to-
day. In the world of experimental
DJs, he’s best known as a pioneer
of turntable tricks, but he also has
made lots of spectacular, winning
artworks: a four-screen compila-
tion of Hollywood’s noisiest mo-
ments; a moving video where Mar-
clay drags a “live” electric guitar
OUT OF AFRICA: The Moroccan details in Matisse’s paintings derived in part
from shots like this postcard, acquired during one of his visits to North Africa.
right across it.
A photographic vision
So there I was at this MoMA show, en-
grossed in its strangely solid blacks, its
grays touched with thin color, its re-
versed-out monotypes and backward
writing, when it hit me: I’d seen all this
before. It was there already, prior to and
all around Matisse — in photography.
Matisse wasn’t simply up against the
world in these four years of great and
profound painting, as any painter might
be. He was confronting the photographic
images that most deeply shape our view
of it.
At just this moment, when cubism’s
star was rising, Matisse had been ac-
cused of being old-fashioned, arbitrary, a
fashionista — like someone making
neckties, as Picasso was supposed to
have quipped, with just a grain of truth.
For the four years covered in this show,
Matisse makes art that shows that he can
pull the world apart as well as any cubist
could.
But his nods to photography let him
go even further, probing not just the real
itself but the ideals of realism that even
cubism still clung to.
If photography most clearly repre-
sents what counts as “real,” Matisse
would undo its reality effects. He showed
it up as nothing more than shapes on a
flat surface. Whereas Picasso’s cubist
decomposings seem to happen in 3-D,
unpicking the world in depth, Matisse’s
cut it up the way you’d take scissors to a
magazine.
The gray-on-gray figures in his “Bath-
behind a speeding pickup truck
until it dies. Those aren’t in the
Whitney exhibition, however. In-
stead, its curators are taking
chances on works that pretty
much get made during the show.
One wall of a huge gallery has
been turned into a blackboard
ruled as music paper. Visitors are
invited to “compose” on it — with
musical notes or any other kind of
mark they want — and profession-
al musicians then come in to play
the bizarre scores that result.
In another piece, the Whitney is
showing Marclay’s collection of
secondhand ties and sweaters and
dresses that feature musical notes.
Those scores, too, will be “played”
by musicians, during a kind of
fashion parade.
This isn’t the side of Marclay
that is easiest to understand,
which is a fine reason for the
Whitney to give it such close atten-
tion.
The Whitney’s middle floor is
devoted to a touring show of the
works of Charles Burchfield, the il-
ers” could almost be paper dolls. His “Pi-
ano Lesson” is closer to a kindergarten
collage than to the in-depth, pry-bar
demolitions of cubism. The strangely in-
dependent fields of “Goldfish and Pal-
ette” could almost be multiple photos
joined at their edges.
Like everyone alive in his time, Ma-
tisse, the great painter, was in fact im-
mersed in a world of photographs. By
1913, newspapers had invested in presses
that for the first time allowed them to
overflow with photos. The new postcard
craze was in full swing. The Kodak
Brownie had made photographers of
everyone.
And Matisse bought into the medium’s
potential.
He had photos taken of his works,
sometimes in suites as they progressed.
He used photographs to circulate news
of finished paintings to patrons and col-
leagues. As a cultural icon, he sat before
the cameras of photographic veterans
such as Alvin Langdon Coburn and
young stars such as Edward Steichen, as
well as total unknowns. Most telling, he
occasionally used photos in the making
of his art.
At MoMA, a wall text for Matisse’s
paintings of Moroccan scenes reproduc-
es tourist postcards he owned, and could
have used in coming up with some of his
North African details. They were what
triggered my eureka moment in this
show. It’s not just that those postcards
are black and white, evoking all the
blacks and whites and grays so striking
at this moment in Matisse’s career. Like
so many of the era’s photos, they came
lustrator, wallpaper designer and
“regionalist” painter who hit his
stride in the 1920s. He is a fasci-
nating, disconcerting figure who
sidesteps all the critical cliches
that work for dealing with most
art. The Whitney is showing sever-
al of his later watercolor land-
scapes, which are reworkings and
expansions of expressive paint-
ings he made as a young man.
They are slippery even by Burch-
field’s standard.
And on its lowest exhibition lev-
el, the Whitney is featuring “Off
the Wall: Part 1—Thirty Performa-
tive Actions,” pulled from its per-
manent collection. Most such
shows are built around a premise
just strong enough to hold their
miscellaneous works together.
The Whitney’s version feels tight-
er than that, truly exploring a cru-
cial tradition in the history of art
that had artists such as Cindy
Sherman, Robert Longo and Vito
Acconci performing their art as
they made it.
— Blake Gopnik
SEEING BACKWARD: “Piano Lesson,” from 1916, is one of the greatest modern
paintings. It takes a simple domestic scene and fills it with ambiguities. That
woman in the background is in fact a picture of a Matisse painting of a woman.
hand-tinted with pale pinks and blues,
muddied by the grays beneath, which ee-
rily evoke the hues and tones in MoMA’s
Matisse.
His “Woman on a High Stool” has just
that gray-and-watercolor range, as does
his “Bathers.” His “Goldfish and Palette”
has a sense of having first been com-
posed in black and white, as many Ma-
tisses from this era literally were. And
then you can imagine Matisse, the re-
toucher, picking out its most important
details in their iconic colors — in “gold-
fish orange,” “sky blue,” “tangerine or-
ange” and “leaf green.”
One famous 1913 portrait from the
Hermitage that isn’t in this show pre-
sents a woman whose clothing is all col-
ored, with her face left absolutely gray —
precisely as in one of Matisse’s Moroccan
postcards, and in almost every other
tinted photo he’d have seen.
That strange, un-realistic collision of
black and white and color matters as
much to Matisse, I think, as photography
when it is most true to life. Unlike Old
Master painting, carefully handcrafted
to be credible in every detail, photogra-
phy, for all its automatic realism, also
came loaded with unreal accident and
artifice. Every photo, for instance, start-
ed out reversed, in white on black, as a
hard-to-read negative — an effect that’s
strikingly evoked in Matisse’s mono-
types. (Their very tight cropping is also
notably photographic.) Flip a negative
when you’re printing it, as often hap-
pens, and its letters will read backward
— as in Matisse’s “Leyelp” piano.
Photography’s translation of a colored
3-D world into flat black and white can
do as much to confuse space, light and
SUCCESSION H. MATISSE/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY
objects as to reveal them: A black object
in the foreground can touch and become
one with a black shadow that’s much far-
ther back; an overexposed beam of light
can read as a surface stripe that cuts a
space, or a face, in two. Those are just the
kind of confusions we see in Matisse.
Even photos that tell us most about the
world, like the stop-motion imagery of
Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules
Marey — evoked in prints, paintings and
sculptures in the MoMA show — can
look quite unlike it.
So, Matisse seems to conclude by the
end of his four-year campaign, if photog-
raphy can never reveal the world as it is,
what hope is there for painting? You
might as well go further into fantasy. Be-
fore the war is done, he moves south, to
the sun and sky of Nice, and begins his
great suite of naked odalisques.
“When you have exploited the possi-
bilities that lie in one direction,” Matisse
said at just this moment, “you must,
when the time comes, change course,
search for something new.”
gopnikb@washpost.com
Matisse: Radical Invention,
1913-1917
is at the Museum of Modern Art, New York,
through Oct. 11. Admission is by timed ticket,
and some slots could sell out. Call
212-708-9400 or visit www.moma.org.
ON WASHINGTONPOST.COM For more
examples of the work on display in
“Matisse: Radical Invention," visit
washingtonpost.com/style.

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C O N C E RT S B L O G S A N D C H AT S wa s h i n g t o n p o s t . c o m /s t yle O N L OV E
Tough market Recrossing
for touring Philip Kennicott Replicas of famous houses: Patriotism or just sheer bravado? E4 paths
Canceled dates Despite their best
Elegant craft Basket weaving has evolved from slaves’ chore to fine art. E9 intentions, it took a
mean a challenging
summer for while for them to get
promoters. E5 Ask Amy, E10 Celebrations, E9 Cul de Sac, E10 Movie Guide, E7 Horoscope, E10 Lively Arts Guide, E4 together. E8

ROBIN GIVHAN
On Fashion

Industry’s going Gaga,

but flash may flame out

I
n recent days, Lady Gaga has performed— in
a blood-smeared bodice — at an AIDS
fundraiser hosted by Elton John and been
honored — along with Beyoncé — with an award
for video of the year by Black Entertainment
Television. She has been entertaining her fans
via Twitter and on her Monster Ball tour, during
which she looks like a cross between Catwoman
and Gene Simmons. After witnessing a live
performance by the fearless fashion gamin at
this spring’s Costume Institute ball at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, it’s accurate to say
she works hard for her applause and she earns
every bit of it. Gaga knows how to entertain.
Though she’s been in the spotlight for barely
two years, folks, particularly fashion types, have
been indiscriminately tossing around the word
“icon.” They apply it to Lady Gaga because she
has the audacity to wear Kermit the Frog coats,
Philip Treacy millinery sculptures, Alexander
McQueen tentlike cloaks and Giorgio Armani
crystal-studded scaffolding.
The fashion industry has found a kindred
spirit in Mistress Gaga, as she is willing to wear
the most dramatic — and at times, absurd —
runway creations onstage. Her choices are well
beyond the range of average pop stars who
choose their costumes for effect but also with
the unwritten rule that those costumes must
make them look good. There doesn’t seem to be
any such governing principle in Gaga’s
decisions. She gives herself over to shock and
showmanship.
In that way, she is reminiscent of Sir Elton,
whose early costumes could be both playful and
outlandish and never seemed geared to making
him look either cool or comfortable onstage.
Indeed, Gaga once performed at the piano
wearing the equivalent of a Thanksgiving Day
float. It was a testament to her stubborn tenacity
that her look is, if not everything, then at least a

givhan continued on E6

Afraid
to make

T
waves by Blake Gopnik

his Fourth of July, let’s celebrate courage. It took courage to

split from England, courage to risk democracy and still
more courage to dream up a constitution to preserve it.
Courage has been the signature virtue of almost every
great American: Emily Dickinson was brave to warp gram-
Norman Rockwell
sold a comfortable
vision of America, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: MARIO ANZUONI/REUTERS; LUCY NICHOLSON/
REUTERS; POOL PHOTO VIA REUTERS; CHRIS PIZZELLO/ASSOCIATED PRESS

mar, Louis Armstrong was brave to blow jazz and Jackson Pollock was FEARLESS: Lady Gaga is audacious in her

brave to paint splats. and America bought styling, but boldness is not the sole feature of
an enduring fashion icon.
Norman Rockwell is often championed as the great painter of Amer-
ican virtues. Yet the one virtue most nearly absent from his work is cour-
age. He doesn’t challenge any of us, or himself, to think new thoughts or
it. Fifty-seven of the
try new acts or look with fresh eyes. From the docile realism of his style to
the received ideas of his subjects, Rockwell reliably keeps us right in the
artist’s paintings are Music: To
middle of our comfort zone.
That’s what made him one of the most important painters in U.S. his-
now on display at stage new
tory, and the most popular. He had almost preternatural social in-
the Smithsonian. American
tuitions, along with brilliant skills as a visual salesman. Over his seven-
decade career, that coupling let him figure out what middle-class white operas, it
Americans most wanted to feel about themselves, then sell it back to
them in paint. (He started working as an illustrator at 16, in 1910. He helps to think
died, still in the saddle at 84, in 1978.)
You could say that Rockwell painted the backdrop against which HIGH AND DRY: Norman Rockwell’s “High Dive”
appeared on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post in
small. Page C3
American courage has had to play out. 1947. He painted 323 covers for the magazine.

rockwell continued on E2 KATHERINE FREY/THE WASHINGTON POST

by Anne Midgette

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WALK ON THE MILD SIDE: A show of 57 Norman Rockwell works, from the collections of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, includes oil paintings and drawings, each a depiction of Rockwellian America.
Rockwell keeps America in its comfort zone
rockwell from E1
A new show of 57 Rockwells, borrowed
from the collections of Hollywood celeb-
rities Steven Spielberg and George Lu-
cas, opened Friday at the Smithsonian
American Art Museum. It includes oil
paintings and drawings, and every one of
them is a perfect depiction of what we’ve
been taught to think of as true Rock-
wellian America.
There’s the small-town runaway, and
the cop who takes him out for a malt be-
fore returning him home. Aw, shucks.
There are the three old biddies gossip-
ing, imagined as so ancient and gnarled
that Rockwell had to use a man in drag to
model them. What a hoot!
There’s the remote blonde in her con-
vertible being joshed by a couple of
truckers. Jeez, lady, wontcha give those
guys a wink?
In ads and magazine covers, on calen-
dars and Green Stamps books — on any
surface that took ink, for any client who
could afford his fees — Rockwell sold us
the vision of America as a place where
troubles are never more than “scrapes”
and flaws are always “foibles.”
Rockwell remains resolutely, immov-
ably on the mild side even when he goes
“serious,” as in his famous “Four Free-
doms” series from 1942. (The conserva-
tive critic Dave Hickey, otherwise a Rock-
well booster, has said that “when he’s do-
ing ideas, he’s really awful.”) Rockwell’s
vision of “Freedom of Speech,” included
in the Smithsonian’s show, doesn’t in-
voke a communist printing his pam-
phlets or an atheist on a soapbox. It gives
us a town hall meeting of almost inter-
changeable New Englanders, no doubt
agreeing to disagree about something as
divisive as the rates for those new park-
ing meters. For this, the Founders risked
powder and ball?
Of course, Rockwell’s true achieve-
ment wasn’t in his trepidatious, homoge-
nized vision of the country. That existed
already. (The Saturday Evening Post, for
instance, for which Rockwell painted 323
covers, forbade him to depict blacks ex-
cept in subservient roles. Toward the end
of his career, Rockwell got Look maga-
zine to publish a few heroic scenes from
the civil rights movement — at just the
moment when such subjects had moved
into the mainstream of American
thought.) Rockwell’s great accomplish-
ment lay in selling us this tepid vision of
ourselves as one we simply had to buy
into, on a communal scale.
The sales pitch
Painting from scenes he set up,
propped and cast — or more often from
snapshots of those scenes — Rockwell
achieved a photographic vision meant to
convince us of the simple truth of what
his images show. Even after all these
years, high realist pictures never fail to
play the magic trick of making us think
that because they look so real, they must
show things as they are.
Rockwell’s technique goes further. Be-
cause of his pictures’ particular perspec-
tival constructions, some of them can
give a sense that his subjects are being
viewed from some slight distance off, by
someone removed from the hurly-burly
they show. (In one image, which depicts
a teacher receiving birthday wishes from
her class, the scene’s imagined viewer
would have to be floating in mid-air to
see things as the painting shows them.)
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RECOGNIZING OURSELVES: The collection features, at top, “First Trip to a Beauty Shop,” 1972, and “The Flirts,”
1941, and below, a Life magazine cover from 1917 titled “Polley Voos Fransay?” (Soldier Speaking to Little French Girl).
It’s as though Rockwell’s subjects have
been recorded by a remote, objective
watcher whose vision we can trust.
Rockwell’s art makes Rockwell’s Amer-
ica seem natural and necessary. His easy,
untroubled realism is the perfect vehicle
for an image of the nation as easygoing
and untroubled: Looking at (or through)
a Rockwell surface is as painless as living
in a Rockwell world.
Not that Rockwell ever quite heads for
a full-blown photorealism, in Richard
Estes mode. He takes care to keep a few
hints of the passage of his brush, which
let him borrow some of the prestige of
the Old Masters. He joins the persuasive
power of photographic technology to the
“hard work” of realist painting, with its
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COLLECTION OF GEORGE LUCAS
popular appeal.
Sometimes Rockwell so badly wants
his photo-based pictures to look painted,
even once they’ve been reduced and re-
produced in print, that he starts by lay-
ing down a rough surface of generically
expressive brushstrokes, then applies his
tightly rendered image on top. Those
brushstrokes tell us that his Rockwellian
America is better than simply real — it
belongs to the hallowed realm of art. (In
case Rockwell himself failed to get that
message across, the current owners of
his paintings have framed his down-to-
earth, supposedly democratic canvases
in enough curlicues and gilt to please
Louis XIV.)
Of course, the “art” in Rockwell’s pic-
COLLECTION OF STEVEN SPIELBERG
KATHERINE FREY/THE WASHINGTON POST
tures isn’t that modern stuff promoted
by Picasso and his crowd. Rockwell’s
painted realism tells us that his pictures
are the real thing, old-fashioned and
skilled — the very art admired by the
kinds of regular, all-American folk his
craft is used to depict, and to whom it
sells magazines and products.
By the 1930s, making pictures the way
Rockwell did couldn’t count as just a
neutral preference for the old. In the
hands of America’s Favorite Artist, it
stood as a willed repudiation of the new.
Judging from the fan mail that survives,
that’s precisely how it was read. Rockwell
panders, in the very substance of his pic-
tures’ making, to his public’s fear of
change.
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KATHERINE FREY/THE WASHINGTON POST
The art of the received idea
Rockwell’s greatest sin as an artist is
simple: His is an art of unending cliché.
The reason we so easily “recognize our-
selves” in his paintings is because they
reflect the standard image we already
know. His stories resonate so strongly be-
cause they are the stories we’ve told our-
selves a thousand times.
Those stories couldn’t have been
otherwise. To sell the publications and
goods his pictures were in aid of, Rock-
well’s images needed to be grasped and
digested in seconds — and, unlike really
notable art, they reliably achieved such
fast-food effects.
His young women are always “spunky”
or “hotties.” Young girls are “impish” or
“pure.” Husbands are “harried” and
Grandpa is “kindly.” And young boys —
as the art history scholar Eric Segal has
pointed out — are either good and scrap-
py, busy roughhousing at the rural swim-
ming hole, or urban and effeminate and
overcivilized, in need of a good, toughen-
ing hazing.
Segal is part of a Rockwell reassess-
ment that began around the time of the
artist’s last Washington retrospective,
held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art just
10 years ago. If the experts haven’t found
new reasons to like him, they’ve found
new ways to look at his achievement. Lit-
erary scholar Richard Halpern has sug-
gested that Rockwell’s vision of America
is aware of its own gaps, making his
paintings “not so much innocent as . . .
about the way we manufacture inno-
cence.” The eminent art historian Alan
Wallach has dared to see Rockwell’s “cap-
italist realism” as deeply ideological,
along the lines of socialist realism.
Most reactions to Rockwell, however,
continue to be decidedly simpler. Steven
Spielberg has said, “I look back at these
paintings as America the way it could
have been, the way someday it may again
be.” He and others have bought Rock-
well’s bill of goods. But what these speak-
ers, and these pictures, fail to grasp is
that the special, courageous greatness of
the nation lies in its definitive refusal of
any single “American way.”
America isn’t about Rockwell’s one-
note image of it — or anyone else’s. This
country is about a game-changing guar-
antee that equal room will be made for
Latino socialists, disgruntled lesbian
spinsters, foul-mouthed Jewish comics
and even, dare I say it, for metrosexual
half-Canadian art critics with a fondness
for offal, spinets and kilts.
I don’t want to live by the clichés of a
wan, Rockwellian America, and I don’t
admire pictures that suggest that all of us
should. But I see why we need to look
into how, in a world full of threats, so
many of us have been soothed by their vi-
sion.
gopnikb@washpost.com
Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell From the
Collections of George Lucas and Steven
Spielberg is on through Jan. 2 at the
Smithsonian American Art Museum, at Eighth
and G streets NW. Call 202-633-7970 or visit
www.americanart.si.edu.
MORE PHOTOS View additional photos
of the Norman Rockwell exhibit at the
Smithsonian American Art Museum at
washingtonpost.com/style.
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MUSIC B L O G S A N D C H AT S wa s h i n g t o n p o s t . c o m /s t yle O N L OV E
Face value, Salad days
and more Interview Writer-director Nicole Holofcener’s new movie is “Please Give.” E11 In an unlikely
Here’s how ticket scenario, love
Carolyn Hax If you don’t want children, be sure to tell your husband. E12 bloomed at the
companies’
processing fees Olive Garden.
add up. E3 Ask Amy, 12 Celebrations, 11 Cul de Sac, 12 Movie Guide, 9 Horoscope, 12 Lively Arts Guide, 4 E10

Pull over and consider cars not as machines

but as masterpieces of industrial seduction.

IT WAS A VERY
by Blake Gopnik GOOD YEAR: A
in Atlanta 1937 Bugatti Type
57S Atalante, Chassis

O
n a recent holiday Friday, when they could have been out fishing, a gaggle of 10-year-old No. 57562, above.
Left: The radiator
boys walked into an art museum and responded with surprising, almost blasphemous en- grille from this 1937
thusiasm: “Holy God!” ¶ “Pretty awesome!!” ¶ Even more surprising was the reaction of this Delage D8-120S, one
of the greatest of all
jaded critic, almost five times their age. I shared their awe. ¶ My enthusiasm came as a surprise, even to coachbuilt cars,
me, because of what we were looking at: some of the finest cars ever made, from a 1934 ultra-deluxe Pack- sweeps back as
though bent by the
ard Twelve Runabout Speedster to a 1961 Aston Martin DB4GT racecar, almost 50 years old yet so great it wind, or as though
seemed timeless. ¶ Every one of these automobiles turned out to be stunning, irresistible — awesome. the top of the grill
has yet to catch up to
That inescapable appeal also called them out as complex, almost troubling works of art, on the order of its bottom. In fact,
the sacred masterpieces painted in Spain under the Inquisition or the glorious tapestries that helped sell this French car body
is one of the first
autocratic rule in France. ¶ A boy too young to drive can adore cars anyway. So can a non-driving art crit- ones anywhere to be
ic, I discovered. (Actually, I have driven — at least 10 times.) Unlike those youngsters, my lack of automo- wind-tunnel tested.
bility is mostly based on principles: I hold cars responsible for a number of evils, from global warming to
suburban sprawl. Yet here I was grinning like a kid among the 18 cars in “The cars continued on E5
PHOTOS BY PETER HARHOLDT

‘ B EAT M E M O R I E S ’
Gown and country:
Despite deep themes, only the surface is explored The fabrics of American life
vernacular of style is a daunting goal
Poet’s photography exhibit at a time when women as diverse as
first lady Michelle Obama and
delves into mortality, family, performance artist Lady Gaga are
but falls short in scope celebrated by the media in almost
equal measure. It seems a thankless
project, too, destined to draw
accusations of reductive analysis.
by Philip Kennicott
ROBIN GIVHAN What benefit is there in hashing out
In 1956, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg was On Fashion a national style when economies and
hitchhiking near Carmel, Calif., when he cultures interact in a global
passed a wooden sign that marked Ed- new york marketplace? Japanese women, credit

ward Weston’s home. So the young Gins-
berg dropped in unannounced on one of
the world’s most famous photographers,
by then in his late 60s and ill with Parkin-
son’s disease. Weston was polite, showed
Ginsberg some photographs, and then
ushered him out, saying, “Don’t forget. I
was once a young bohemian like you, too.”
It was a poignant comment, and it
made a powerful impression on Gins-
berg, whose cultural stock was quickly
rising after his legendary 1955 recitation
of “Howl” at San Francisco’s Six Gallery.
Perhaps photographers have a keener
sense of aging, given how remorselessly
the camera collects evidence of decay
over the years.
T
he Costume Institute at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art
has tackled complicated
cultural conceits, from the save-the-
universe fantasies of superheroes to
the glamorous mythology
surrounding models. But there are
few topics as challenging and
fascinating as trying to understand
ALLEN GINSBERG; COURTESY OF HOWARD GREENBERG GALLERY the American woman through her
POET IN MOTION: “Allen Ginsberg,” a 1953 print from the exhibit of his images. style of dress.
The impulse to put people into neat
Aging haunts many of the photographs nating but not always convincing Nation- categories is irresistible, and the
that Ginsberg took in his lifetime, espe- al Gallery show “Beat Memories: The desire to explain what it means to be
cially those he began making in the 1980s Photographs of Allen Ginsberg,” you have American — beyond citizenship — has
while trying to build a reputation in the become a hot topic. But defining an
art world. Wandering through the fasci- ginsberg continued on E7 American identity through the
cards in hand, storm the doors of
French companies such as Hermes
and Louis Vuitton; French women
shop at the Gap; and American
women rely on an Italian named
Giorgio Armani for their power-
dressing needs.
So from the outset, one feels pangs
of sympathy for curator Andrew
Bolton and no small amount of
skepticism about his exhibition,
“American Woman: Fashioning a
National Identity,” which runs
through Aug. 15. What has he got
himself into?
givhan continued on E6

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FLY ME: To get that “aerodynamic” modern look, the 1938 Alfa Romeo 8C2900B Touring Berlinetta has a grille set farther out than necessary, a triample of design over function seen in the era’s deluxe automobiles.
Industry’s ‘classic’ propaganda machines
cars from E1
Allure of the Automobile,” a show orga-
nized by the High Museum in Atlanta. ¶
Then it occurred to me that my carefree
reaction was precisely what these cars
had in mind. Their aim is to sell their own
mechanical utopia so well that even the
greatest skeptic can’t resist. They con-
vincingly deny that anything could be
wrong with the modern world that gave
birth to cars and that cars have helped
move ahead. They are hand-built, cus-
tom-crafted propaganda for a world of
mass production.
Like all propaganda, deluxe automo-
biles tidy up the messes in the system
they are selling.
The origins of cars are in a factory’s
smoke, noise and stink. Yet the greatest of
them have clean lines that are so close to
Platonic that it’s hard to imagine them
getting made at all. These cars seem to
have sprung to life in a state of perfection,
in some glade among the country lanes
where their photos always place them.
There seems to be something inalter-
ably right about the dropped rear end of a
1937 Mercedes-Benz 540K Special Road-
ster. In a 1933 Pierce-Arrow Silver Arrow,
there’s perfection in the molten flow of
metal that leads from headlights into
hood into body. Fingers long to feel the
immaculate curves of a 1957 Jaguar XK-
SS.
Yet these cars don’t appeal to us simply
as gorgeous abstract sculpture. Sure, you
could claim that the curves of the fenders
on a 1937 Hispano-Suiza H-6C Xenia are
as much to be admired as the shoulders of
the Venus de Milo; that the radiator grille
on a Delage D8 120-S, a car also from
1937, is as impressive as the flowing lines
of a Renaissance engraving. But the truth
is that we admire cars as cars, and marvel
that technology could rise to such aes-
thetic heights. A great car’s goal is to get
us to marvel at just that.
Though all of them are functional ma-
chines — the automobile is the iconic
functional machine of our entire modern
era — these one-off cars make pedestrian
function fade away behind good looks.
They’re out to appeal even to visitors too
young to know what it would feel like to
use them; their force is as much visual
and symbolic as mechanical and practi-
cal.
That gap between function and look is
there at the birth of many of our greatest
cars. In the 1920s and ’30s and even be-
yond, a millionaire driver would first buy
a high-functioning, factory-made chassis
— nothing more than four good wheels
and a fine motor on a raw steel frame,
manufactured by luxury automakers
such as Delage and Packard. The chassis’
new owner would then have a unique
body fitted to it by one of a handful of cus-
tom “coachbuilders,” who were direct de-
scendants of the firms that built carriages
for 19th-century toffs. In their new in-
carnation, these craftsmen built moving
works of art for a new nobility that came
from Hollywood and Wall Street.
The custom-bodied Packard LeBaron
Runabout Speedster was a gift from Car-
ole Lombard to Clark Gable. It had a
floating teardrop step to help the lady get
in. The stunningly aerodynamic Hispano-
Suiza Xenia, with a body by the Parisian
builder Jacques Saoutchik, was a one-off
built in 1937 for the spirits magnate An-
dré Dubonnet.
The bodies on such cars are often en-
tirely handcrafted, but you’d never know
it. Instead of the curlicues and fancy
touches that you’d see in furniture or in
the finest horse-drawn carriages, these
handmade cars are all about the look of
industry, sleek and symmetrical. (You
wonder if that 1961 Aston Martin, a stun-
ning object hand-bodied by the Italian
craftsmen at Carrozzeria Zagato, has gas
caps on both flanks as much for a bal-
anced look as because it needs two ways
to take its fuel.)
Many of the showiest of autos forego
human comforts and conveniences to de-
clare themselves the ultimate machines
of the new Machine Age. Headroom looks
in awfully short supply in Gable’s Pack-
ard; the Pierce-Arrow has a rear window
designed more to impress the drivers be-
M
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All in the details
A detail from the front end of a 1934 Packard Twelve Runabout
Speedster, a gift from Carol Lombard to Clark Gable that was
customized by the LeBaron workshop. It is one of the last great cars in
which the custom body doesn’t entirely conceal the chassis that it’s
built on — note the structural components that extend beyond the
radiator grille.
hind you than to let you get a clear view of
them. In fact, most of these hand-built
showpieces, barely even used for Sunday
driving, come closer to looking like Ma-
chine Age icons than do the millions of
Model T’s that were truly factory-made,
and were actually moving people on the
streets of 1920s Paris and New York —
and that hadn’t lost the look of a hand-
built Victorian carriage.
Part of the point of these deluxe cars is
to signal their difference from the cars
just anyone could have, but they do that
by evoking an idealized vision of assem-
bly-line tech. The huge, straight-8 engine
on a 1935 Duesenberg JN Roadster (an-
other gift from Lombard to Gable) is ex-
hausted through external side pipes that
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TRUE ART: Raphael’s
“Alba Madonna” and
great cars like the 1954
Dodge Firearrow III
share the clean forms and
surface perfections by
which “classic” art makes
the worldview it
represents seem
necessary and natural.
LEFT, NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART; OTHER PHOTOS BY PETER HARHOLDT
The cockpit of a 1954 Dodge Firearrow III Concept Coupe is as sleek
and industrial as its glorious outside — although both were hand-built.
Instead of looking like some rich man’s library, all burled wood and
leather, this all-metal cockpit looks like machine-shop equipment.
look like industrial ducting — and were was no secret that modern industry was a
probably put on the car just for looks, or chaotic business that might have as many
so I was told by Ken Gross, the outside au- drawbacks as advantages. But the most
tomotive expert brought in to work on rarefied of early cars almost seem eager to
this art museum show. (It so happens he’s defend and symbolically streamline the
a local, from Hamilton, Va.) The 1954 messy industrial advances that generated
Dodge Firearrow III, a luscious concept the surplus wealth that allowed them to
car that was meant to help sell Chrysler’s exist. Some of the finest of these automo-
truly mass-produced products, was in biles were in fact designed during the
fact custom-built by the Italian coach- Great Depression, almost as a denial of
builders at Carrozzeria Ghia. And yet, in a the breakdowns that industrial society
very rare move, the surfaces inside its can face.
cockpit were finished in the same sleek You can see this whitewashing at work
metal as the car’s exterior — as though to in them: Their sleek bodies try to hide the
make it clear that this car is a machine clunky chassis beneath, but sometimes
through and through, without a hint of they slip up. On the 1934 Packard or the
humanizing wood or leather. 1935 Duesenberg, two chunky steel
From Dickens to Marx to Chaplin, it beams and the rod that ties them together
K
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still peek out in front of their fancy radia-
tor grilles. In later years, the bottom of
the grille comes swooping forward to san-
itize that mess. In the 1937 Delage, the re-
sult is a grille that looks fabulously wind-
swept and aerodynamic — as though a
Rolls had gone so fast it melted — but
whose true purpose is close to cosmetic.
Look through the open grillwork of the
1938 Alfa Romeo 8C2900B Touring Berli-
netta, another car with a gorgeously
slicked-back front end — it may be the
most beautiful automobile, ever — and
you see that there’s a foot or more of emp-
ty space before the engine begins. The
grille could be set farther back, but that
perfectly functional option wouldn’t look
as aggressively modern or as seamlessly
factory-made as the finished product
does.
The stunning “aerodynamic” shapes
that come to dominate so many of these
cars have little to do with making them
work better. Engineers learned early on
that, at realistic speeds, it took little more
power to move a boxy coupe than one
that was all curves. They also learned that
some swooping shapes that might look ef-
ficient could actually slow a vehicle. Yet
that knowledge didn’t slow the fashion
for these forms: They were a crucial sym-
bol of technology’s latest successes.
That’s also why the look of the aerody-
namic could come to vary so widely, from
Dubonnet’s 1937 biomorphs to the sup-
pository sweep of a 1957 Jaguar to the
knifelike edges of a hand-built 1959 Cor-
vette Sting Ray. That streamlined look
couldn’t stand still: It had to change over
time to signify the never-ending march of
engineering progress.
It could even be that fine artists, the
world’s expert symbol-makers, discov-
ered the sleekness that came to stand for
modern life before it was discovered in
industrial design. Modernist sculptors
such as Constantin Brancusi, as well as
car-obsessed futurist artists such as Gia-
como Balla and Gino Severini, were de-
lighting in “streamlined” forms before
those forms began appearing in cars. The
automobiles they were driving would
have been boxy clunkers. The “roaring
motor car” that Filippo Marinetti de-
clared “more beautiful than the ‘Victory
of Samothrace’ ” in his 1909 “Futurist
Manifesto” wouldn’t have had a stream-
lined form in sight, but you’d never guess
that from the sleek lines of his move-
ment’s art. Artists made polished forms
stand for modernity, then modern reality
adopted them later.
The fluid geometry of a great car pre-
tends to slice through the resistance it en-
counters in the air, but it also breaks
down all resistance in us. Unlike the
greatest cars, some great works of art
have always drawn attention to their own
complexity: Think of the confusing forms
in paintings by Titian, Cézanne and Picas-
so. Those works turn difficulty and arti-
fice into a selling point, by inviting us to
make our way through a stream of man-
made visual challenges.
Our most exquisite automobiles, how-
ever, belong to an opposite artistic tradi-
tion. They want to seem perfectly natural,
necessary, irresistible in their uncompli-
cated perfection. They remind me of the
clean forms and immaculate surfaces of
Raphael’s “Alba Madonna,” painted circa
1510 and possibly the greatest object held
by our National Gallery. The painting lets
its viewers’ eyes slip into its holy scene
without encountering any trace of resis-
tance, and that’s what makes its Christian
content seem so necessary and natural.
That’s also what makes the painting work
so well as “classic” art — as just the way
art has to be to be right. These autos are
“classics” in that same sense. We don’t
just smile at their surface perfections.
Those perfections get us to swallow a
whole worldview, while barely even
knowing that we have.
gopnikb@washpost.com
ON WASHINGTONPOST.COM Listen to
Blake Gopnik narrate a photo gallery of
some of the breathtaking cars featured at “The
Allure of the Automobile” exhibit in Atlanta.
And see readers’ photos of their prized cars at
washingtonpost.com/style.

TUESDAY, MAY 25, 2010
A RT R E V I E W
A BEAUTIFUL MIND: By his 30th birthday, Yves Klein had already begun interrogating the “void.” Above, his “Untitled Anthropometry (Ant. 100),” made in 1960, two years before his untimely death.
An out-of-this-world blue vision
Yves Klein captured
the sublime by finding
a color for longing
by Blake Gopnik
O
f all the dazzling stuff on this
planet, not much beats the art
of Yves Klein. In 1956, Klein in-
vented a blue paint that made
his paintings and sculptures as
gorgeous as anything could be. Over the
seven years of his career — Klein died of a
heart attack in 1962, when he was only 34
— the Frenchman made something like
1,000 works, one richer than the next.
Two hundred are now here, and the huge
Klein survey that just opened at the
Hirshhorn Museum could hardly be
more alluring. Americans haven’t seen a
full spread of Kleins in almost three dec-
ades, and it might never happen again:
The powdered pigment is so fragile that
the works are almost unshippable, and
they’re getting so expensive you can
hardly insure them. That makes this one
of the most important shows in Hirsh-
horn history. It’s also one of the most
beautiful. Curator Kerry Brougher has in-
stalled the survey with a courageous re-
straint that lets the art speak for itself.
But here’s the strange and most impor-
tant thing about Klein’s art: Its direct,
material appeal is not what’s at its heart.
These are earthbound objects that want
desperately to point to a world of imma-
terial spirit. Klein’s gorgeous matter
hopes to transcend everything that’s
down here on this planet.
Weirder yet, its beauty seems to end up
showing that transcendence is impos-
sible. No matter how much you might
wish to find deeper truths in Klein’s heav-
enly blue, it always ends up being smartly
formulated paint.
That makes Klein’s art much more
than simply gorgeous: It’s also poignant,
almost tragic, because it’s about the
grandest of defeats. It lets us watch an
artist try to do more than any artist hu-
manly could, and then fail in the attempt.
You might say that, taken together, the
all-blue artworks in the Hirshhorn’s
Klein survey — not to mention the show’s
peculiar films and photographs, as well
as its works in gold or white or pink —
paint a picture of Icarus flying high in the
sky, at the moment when the wax on his
wings is melting.
Blue-sky ideas
Yves Klein is most famous, and influ-
ential, as the inventor of monochrome
abstraction. From the very beginning, he
looked into what would happen if you
covered a canvas in a single color of paint,
then presented it as art. The Hirshhorn
shows him trying it out with red and or-
ange and black and green, before perfect-
ing the blissful ultramarine that he pat-
ented as IKB — International Klein Blue.
(What he patented wasn’t, in fact, the col-
or itself, which dates back to before Giot-
to, but a way of mixing the ground pig-
ment with a synthetic binder so it
wouldn’t lose the dry, velvety intensity it
had as a powder. One Klein installation
re-created at the Hirshhorn consists of a
huge trough of IKB pigment itself, which
the artist’s estate continues to stock.)
There’s no other artistic experience
quite like looking at (more like tumbling
into) one of Klein’s blue monochromes.
Even in nature, just about the only place
you ever see something like this — an all-
encompassing color that doesn’t seem to
have a surface and a distance you can pin
it to — is when you look up into a cloud-
less sky. These blue pictures evoke such
unfathomable skies, but Klein seems to
have distilled the color out of them, then
concentrated it on a canvas. They aren’t
just a feast for sore eyes. They’re more
like a lifetime’s worth of ocular nourish-
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PHOTO BY SHUNK-KENDER/COPYRIGHT ROY LICHTENSTEIN FOUNDATION; YVES KLEIN ARCHIVES/COPYRIGHT ARTISTS RIGHTS
SOCIETY
YVES KLEIN ARCHIVES/COPYRIGHT ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY
REVOLUTIONARY: At top, “Obsession With Levitation (Leap Into the Void)”
combines a photo of Klein jumping into helpers’ arms and a photo of an empty
streetscape. With 1961’s “Blue Globe,” he wraps the world in his signature hue.
ment. viewers’ senses — although his mono-
That isn’t nearly enough for Klein, or chromes were at the root of so much later
for many of his admirers. Klein said he art that aimed to do just that. (Frank Stel-
didn’t want to be thought of as just an- la, the later American abstractionist who
other abstractionist, intent on feeding his once met Klein, famously said that in his
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LEE STALSWORTH/HIRSHHORN MUSEUM AND SCULPTURE GARDEN
own near-monochromes, “what you see is
what you see.”) For Klein, the mono-
chrome is meant to reveal “that immea-
surable ‘void’ in which lives the perma-
nent and absolute spirit freed of all di-
mensions.”
Your typical Klein fan has always said
similarly vaporous things. One scholar
opined that the artist’s portraits, pre-
sented as blue-painted body casts (a gor-
geous one concludes this show) are about
“a sublimation of the personal aura, a
transformation of physical sensuality
into the inviolable if ineffable presence of
enduring artistic values.” I have no idea
what these claims mean; I mostly doubt
they mean anything. And yet I’m perfect-
ly aware of how much all of us, including
me — and especially including Klein him-
self — wished we could make transcen-
dence come true as a coherent, compre-
hensible, effable state.
That’s what IKB is all about: the des-
perate human desire to bring transcen-
dence within arm’s reach by giving it a
material presence in art. And then, more
interesting yet, it’s about how even art’s
most beautiful matter will never do the
trick. Paint remains tethered to the earth
it’s taken from. Or maybe Klein’s art
doesn’t set out to prove that struggling
for transcendence is either useless or val-
id; instead, those blues present a picture
of the struggle itself.
The holy fool
Right from the start, Klein seems to
have known that his quest might be fool-
ish.
Klein’s first mature work — one of the
best he ever made — was a printed book
full of glued-in reproductions of his sin-
gle-color abstractions, each captioned
with the place and year it was painted.
But when the book was published in
1954, those paintings did not yet exist:
Klein’s “reproductions” were just rectan-
gles of colored paper he’d pasted into
each volume. More than that, I’m told
that they were put in almost at random,
so that different copies of the book pair
different colors with different dates and
places. An orange rectangle is labeled
“Paris, 1954” in this exhibition’s copy, but
might go with the words “Tokyo, 1952” in
another. It’s as though Klein himself
knew that the perceptual or even factual
particulars of his project didn’t matter.
He knew that his art would always be
about the gesture of making mono-
chrome abstractions, or of thinking
about making them, rather than the actu-
al results.
Klein could simply declare transcen-
dence as the aim of his abstractions. No
one had to witness that mystic moment.
Then came the ethereal magic of Inter-
national Klein Blue, which made such a
seemingly absurd declaration — “this art
transcends” — more credible. The
weightlessness of IKB made an art of dis-
embodiment believable. But even once
he’d found his blue, you could still ques-
tion the transcendence of Klein’s art.
Sometimes it felt like a joke. On April
28, 1958, his 30th birthday, Klein opened
a one-man show called “Specialization of
Sensibility in the Raw Material State of
Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility,” later
nicknamed “The Void.” It consisted of
nothing more than an empty gallery in
Paris — no blue or anything else. Or as
Klein preferred to put it, a gallery packed
with “immaterial pictorial sensibility.” A
film shot in Klein’s Paris exhibition re-
veals a patch of painting-free wall, as well
as some empty space where one of his
sculptures isn’t. It’s simply impossible to
imagine that you’re supposed to take this
straight. Or if it’s not an outright gag, it’s
deliberate, self-conscious wishful think-
ing. “Wouldn’t it be great if, thanks to an
artist, a merely empty room really could
contain immaterial being?” Klein seems
to ask. Then he leaves it to us, watching a
film of straightforward nothingness, to
answer: “What a shame it can’t.”
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A pigment of our imagination
Yves Klein’s blue art is inescapably appealing.
Which raises the question: Why?
David Stork, an optics expert in Silicon Valley
who also publishes on art, explains that
International Klein Blue is an unusually
saturated color — it may catch our eye just
because it’s got such a quantity of blueness in
it. Most paints consist of powdered pigments
suspended in binders that produce a slight
sheen: The white reflection off the binder
washes out the color of the pigment behind it.
Klein’s patented formula lets his blue
pigment sit as a matte layer on the surface of
his art, with nothing to get between its color
and our eyes. On top of that, by keeping his
paintings a tiny bit rough, Klein creates a
situation where, before hitting our eyes, a ray
of light will bounce from particle to particle,
from blue surface to blue surface. It’s almost
as though each spot of blue pigment is being
lit with a blue light.
Michael Kubovy, a leading psychologist of art
at the University of Virginia, hazards that
Klein’s extra-saturated blue may not be any
old color. It may be what’s called a “unique
hue” — a blue that has absolutely no other
color mixed in with it, and therefore speaks
directly and only to what you could think of as
the “blue-sensing” parts of our brains. Then
Kubovy cites the research of his Berkeley
colleague Stephen Palmer, which shows that
humans have a huge preference for blue over
any other color. (Disclosure: Palmer is editing
a book in which I have contributed a chapter.)
Think about these findings as you get close to
a blue monochrome by Klein, and you realize
that it fills our vision, edge to edge, with
nothing but the bluest of blues, and therefore
with one of the sights that we’re wired to be
most fond of. You could say that it’s a
distillation of the very notion of artistic taste.
— B.G.
Audacious leaps of folly
All of Klein’s best works have this kind
of pie-in-the-sky ambition. He proposed
that his monochrome art had such spirit-
ual power that it would save the world,
via some kind of all-encompassing “Blue
Revolution.” He made outdoor fountains
of pure flame, and “painted” pictures
with a flamethrower, saying that by emu-
lating fire an artist could become “a per-
sonified and universal principle.” His fa-
mous “Leap Into the Void” is a photo that
shows him swan-diving into empty space
out of a second-story window.
But here’s the thing: Klein always let us
have our doubts. His effort to bring about
a “spiritual” revolution included prod-
ding President Dwight Eisenhower to
back him and his artist friends as the next
French administration. (Klein’s hilarious
letter to the White House is in this show;
there’s no sign of a reply.) Klein’s “univer-
sal” fire paintings were done under the
patronage of Gaz de France, a connection
to officialdom that Klein never hid. And
that “Leap” was a faked photo, montaged
from one picture of him jumping into
helpers’ arms and another of an empty
streetscape. Klein’s art doesn’t rise above
these contradictions between grandiose
goals and their prosaic realization. It rev-
els in them.
When Klein made his leap, he didn’t
levitate. He fell to Earth, as he knew he
would. That inevitable fall — and the
courage to jump that precedes it — is
what his art is about.
gopnikb@washpost.com
Yves Klein: With the Void,
Full Powers
Through Sept. 12 at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn
Museum, on the south side of the Mall at
Seventh Street SW. Call 202-633-1000 or visit
www.hirshhorn.si.edu.
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ROBIN GIVHAN B L O G S A N D C H AT S wa s h i n g t o n p o s t . c o m /s t yl e O N L OV E
First lady’s In sickness
Long time coming For indie rockers, “jam band” is no longer a shameful expression. E2
vacation outfits and in health
She proved that Moving on Gospel legend Mavis Staples, teaming with a new musical family. E9 When one partner
informal wear got sick, they
doesn’t have to reconsidered the
mean sloppy. E6 Ask Amy, E10 Celebrations, E9 Cul de Sac, E10 Movie Guide, E7 Horoscope, E10 Lively Arts Guide, E4 wedding idea. E8

V I D E O A RT

JUST
PRESS KATHERINE FREY/THE WASHINGTON POST

PLAY A
santa fe, n.m. STEP FORWARD:
round 1425, in Flanders, oil paint came on the scene. “Flooded McDonald’s,” a projected
video by the Danish collective
Within 50 years, there was Leonardo da Vinci and his Superflex, is at the Hirshhorn’s
amazing effects of light and space. ¶ On Sept. 11, 1841, Black Box through Nov. 28.
Viewers take pleasure in watching
in Washington, John Goffe Rand patented squeezable a fast-food joint get cleansed.
tubes that made oil paints portable. By the 1870s, we
had Claude Monet and his outdoor “impressions.” ¶ On Sept. 27, 1988, Kodak introduced its

Versatile, compelling LC500, the first compact video projector. Two decades later, we’re seeing the apotheosis of vid-
eo art. Some of today’s most adventurous artists — Douglas Gordon, Gillian Wearing, Stan

and easily displayed, Douglas — could not be who they are if they could not project their art. ¶ It’s not a huge stretch
to say that projected video is the one great art form that is truly of our time. ¶ Right now, in an

projected video art center called Site Santa Fe, one of the country’s few biennials of international contempo-
rary art is completely devoted to video, almost all of it projected. ¶ In Washington, the Smith-

has become the art sonian’s Hirshhorn Museum is trumpeting the fifth anniversary of its basement Black Box
space, which is dedicated to video projections. Celebrations include the announcement of an

form of our time. upcoming move to bigger, posher quarters that will have room for multi-screen works. Pend-
ing that move, Black Box just launched a riveting projection of a McDonald’s as it floods, by the

Watch and learn. Danish collective known as Superflex; upstairs, one of the Hirshhorn’s permanent-collection
galleries is featuring a projection of a day at the North Pole, by Dutchman Guido van der
by Blake Gopnik Werve. Down the Mall at the Sackler Gallery, part of the na- video art continued on E4

DA N C E

Lerman: Dancing with the cosmos

The veteran choreographer’s latest adventure tackles some of humanity’s
enduring questions in an ambitious meditation on physics and life
by Sarah Kaufman and body, called “The Matter of Origins.” part of the floor show.
A meditation on physics and life, the “But don’t worry,” Lerman tells them

T
he physicists have arrived in the re-
hearsal studio, slightly rumpled,
sharp-eyed. They’re quick to pick
up on the rules.
“Take your shoes off,” one chides an-
other.
Hands on hips, they stand expectantly
in their socks. Now the dance can begin.
“We were thinking it’d be fun to just
throw you into the deep end and do a lit-
ASTRID RIECKEN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST tle partnering,” announces Liz Lerman,
HIGH-ENERGY PRODUCTION: Benjamin Wegman and Thomas Dwyer of the the veteran choreographer of ideas, who
Liz Lerman Dance Exchange rehearse “The Matter of Origins,” which will be has spent three years piecing together an
performed at the University of Maryland’s Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center. unlikely alliance of science and art, brain
dance-theater work was inspired by Ler-
man’s visit to the particle-accelerating
Large Hadron Collider at the CERN labo-
ratory near Geneva. It will premiere Fri-
day at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts
Center at the University of Maryland. The
production, which will be repeated next
Sunday, is part performance by her dance
company, the Liz Lerman Dance Ex-
change, part tea party (the old-fashioned
kind, with cake) and part floor show.
The three physicists — all professors at
Maryland, including Drew Baden, chair-
man of the physics department — are
soothingly. “We have zero expectations of
you.”
What are they doing here? What is she
doing here? For that matter, what is any
one of us doing here? These and other
weighty questions might or might not be
answered in this work. But Lerman is not
typically after answers. It’s the asking
that moves her.
“There are some enduring questions
that are dogging me,” she says in an inter-
view. “How do we really sustain ourselves
lerman continued on E3

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The power of projection: Art as we see it today

COURTESY OF MARIA LASSNIG/FRIEDRICH PETZEL GALLERY

TALKING HEAD: Maria Lassnig’s 1992 work “Maria Lassnig Kantate” is featured in Site Santa Fe’s biennial of international contemporary art, the first in the country devoted to video, almost all projected.

video art from E1 1970, on an icy pavement in Syra- and certainly expensive, meant
cuse, N.Y., where he was in college: mostly for stadium rock. Only the
tional museum of Asian art, cura- “I dropped it, actually.” bravest artists used them.
tors are about to launch a major But I believe that 20 years later, Large-scale video took off, he
show of Fiona Tan, a Dutch Indo- when video made the switch from says, only in the 1990s, after busi-
nesian who works in projection. monitors to projection, the form ness executives started moving
And up in Bethesda on Wednesday was reborn. Its rebirth brought from overhead transparencies to
night, the city’s Trawick Prize was, new life to all contemporary art. computer presentations, and a
B THEATRE B B COMEDY B for the first time, awarded for pro- With the older, more static me- market developed for projectors
jected art. diastill used by today’s artists , I al- that could put those presentations
At the back of my daybook, I ways have a nagging feeling that a on-screen. Who’d have thought
keep an ever-changing list of the lot of what I like today recycles that PowerPoint would change the
contemporary artists I’m most in- older work I also like. I admire the game for moving-image art?
2010-2011 SEASON terested in. Right now, two-thirds clothes-hanger sculpture of Dan Gallery-goers who had become
of them use projectors. Steinhilber, one of Washington’s used to the poky, lo-fi, TV-scaled
B THEATRE B CIRCLE MIRROR best artists. But I can’t help notice world of early video art can re-
that Man Ray conceived some- member their jaws dropping when
The Studio Theatre TRANSFORMATION “They're the best! There's no one like them,
no one in their league!” —Larry King, CNN The standard Genesis myth for thing pretty close back in 1920. they first saw the spectacle of huge
Opening Sept 8 by Annie Baker “Non-stop hilarious...four stars.” video art centers on the arrival of When it comes to my favorite vid- forms dancing on a gallery wall.
directed by David Muse —Arch Campbell, WRC-TV
Sony’s lightweight “Portapak” re- eo art, however, the precedents are Even in today’s world of giant plas-
CIRCLE MIRROR Opening Wednesday!

SUPERIOR DONUTS
FRIDAYS & SATURDAYS AT 7:30 PM
Ronald Reagan Bldg, 1300 Pennsylvania Ave, NW
corder, in 1967, and the monitors it barely there. ma screens, the biggest monitor
TRANSFORMATION by Tracy Letts
directed by Serge Seiden
INFO: 202-312-1555
Tickets available through TicketMaster at
filled with art. Bill Viola, a 59-year-
old Californian who counts as the
Viola recalls that there were vid-
eo projectors as early as the 1960s,
can’t come close to achieving the
scale and impact of a projection.
by Annie Baker Opening November 10, 2010 Godfather of Video, describes first but they were huge and ornery
directed by David Muse (202) 397-SEAT www.ticketmaster.com
getting his hands on a Portapak in machines, sometimes dangerous
studiotheatre.org • 202-332-3300 MARCUS; OR THE Group Sales: 202-312-1427
To purchase Capitol Steps CDs &
video art continued on E5
cassettes, for private show info:
OLNEY THEATRE CENTER SECRET OF SWEET 703-683-8330•www.capsteps.com
by Tarell Alvin McCraney
Pulitzer Prize - Winner directed by Timothy Douglas
Opening January 5, 2011
DINNER WITH NEW IRELAND: For Hirshhorn ‘Chief Tech,’ Rule 2: No consumer goods;
only machines made for heavy-
FRIENDS THE ENDA WALSH FESTIVAL duty professional use. When he re-
By Donald Margulies Directed by Jim Petosa
TODAY AT 1:45 & 7:45 PM
301.924.3400 olneytheatre.org
PENELOPE
From The Druid Theatre Company,
Galway, Ireland
quite a shopping list cently tried consumer Blu-ray
players — there aren’t really pro
ones yet, he says — they broke af-
directed by Mikel Murfi B CONCERTS B ter a few weeks.
WOOLLY MAMMOTH Opening March 15, 2011 Al Masino has the grand title of side. Masino gets to buy whatever The last time Masino went pro-
New shows just added! THE WALWORTH Robert E. Parilla Director of Exhibitions, Design gadgetry his galleries need. Right jector shopping, he ended up with
PULITZER PRIZE-FINALIST and Special Projects at the Smith- now, as the Hirshhorn prepares to high-end Panasonics. They were
FARCE Performing Arts Center sonian’s Hirshhorn Museum — but move and expand its Black Box fine, he says, despite customer
IN THE NEXT ROOM directed by Matt Torney
Opening April 6, 2011
Montgomery College you can think of him as Chief Tech. video space, Masino is shopping support that wasn’t always sup-
There are downsides to the job. for digital projectors. portive. This time, however, he’s
OR THE THE NEW ELECTRIC
Guest Artist Series
When a loop of film breaks, or a Rule 1: They all need to come considering equipment from
VIBRATOR PLAY
WRITTEN BY SARAH RUHL
BALLROOM
directed by Matt Torney
THE ZOMBIES with
patron jams up a projector, the
buck stops with him.
from the same company, so that
there’s only one set of manuals to
Christie Digital, a pro-only com-
pany that supplies projectors to
DIRECTED BY AARON POSNER
The job also has its upsides, at learn and one set of menu com- most of the country’s digital cin-
Opening April 13, 2011 COLIN BLUNSTONE I ROD ARGENT least for any guy with a geek in- mands. emas.
TICKETS GOING FAST!
September 10 at 8 p.m. For the Hirshhorn’s galleries,
202-393-3939 • woollymammoth.net NEW ARTISTIC with special guests Masino won’t be getting the giant
DIRECTOR’S CHOICE BOBBY HOWARD'S moviehouse models, but he’ll be
ROUND HOUSE THEATRE Take Metrobus or Metrorail to...
Silver Spring directed by David Muse BRITISH WALKERS buying the same technology as
used in cinemas: Texas Instru-
Opening May 25, 2011 Onstage at 7:15 PM
Final performance at 2pm Tickets: $25, $23
ments’ three-chip Digital Light
SPECIAL EVENTS! Processing (DLP), built around mi-
Cherry Smoke TYNAN
TKTS/INFO: 240-567-5301 croscopic mirrors, instead of Ep-
$10 & $15 tickets! M-F, 10AM-6PM, VISA/MC/DISC/AMEX son’s three-panel Liquid Crystal
by Richard Nelson and Colin Chambers 51 Mannakee Street Rockville, MD 20850
based on The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan www.montgomerycollege.edu/PAC Display (3LCD), which got digital
TKTS/INFO: 240-644-1100 directed by Paul Mullins projection started and is still used
roundhousetheatre.org Opening January 19, 2011
B ORCHESTRAL MUSIC B in many home theaters. Compared
n 8641 Colesville Rd, Silver Spring x PALOMINO with 3LCD, says Masino, DLP has
E!
FR E
written, directed and performed improved blacks and is much
by David Cale
Opening June 15, 2011 BALTIMORE and more consistent and durable. (And
expensive: The Hirshhorn’s new
“Shrieks of laughter night
THE STUDIO 2NDSTAGE SYMPHONY MULTICULTURAL CHILDREN’S projectors will each cost in the
SONGS OF THE DRAGONS
after night.” - The Washington Post
FLYING TO HEAVEN ORCHESTRA BOOK FESTIVAL neighborhood of $20,000.)
Only a few of his projectors will
by Young Jean Lee
directed by Natsu Onoda Power
Opening September 29, 2010
SAT., SEP. 11 NOON–7 P.M. be high-definition, since not all art
demands it so far, and he’s found
MOJO that it’s better to run a standard-
by Jez Butterworth definition signal to a standard-
directed by Christopher Gallu
Opening December 1, 2010 definition projector than to feed it
n Tues– Fri at 8, Sat at 6 & 9, Sun at 3 & 7 x POP! to a high-def machine. (Surpris-
Student Rush Tickets Available ingly, his high-def signals will
by Maggie-Kate Coleman
TKTS:202-467-4600 / GROUPS: 202-416-8400
www.kennedy-center.org/shearmadness
and Anna K. Jacobs
directed by Keith Alan Baker
Opening July 13, 2011
Season Preview probably be fed, uncompressed,
from hard drives, rather than from

THEATER J studiotheatre.org
Concert More than 20 FREE PERFORMANCES the Blu-ray discs that are in peo-
ple’s homes — again, the problem
Today at 3 and 7:30! 202-332-3300 All tickets $10 including Richard Smallwood, Eugenia León, is consumer-grade players.)
Rick Foucheux and Deborah Hazlett in Friday, Sept. 10, 8 PM Rocknoceros, Beat Ya Feet Kings, El Gran Silencio, The projectors he buys will be
The Music Center at Strathmore bright: a full 6,500 lumens, which
SOMETHING Rep Stage
Join Music Director Marin Alsop and
National Symphony Orchestra, Nayas, and More! makes them bright enough to use
Graham Greene’s
YOU DID the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra
for a preview concert sampling the
For the latest information, call (202) 467-4600 in only partly darkened rooms.
By Willy Holtzman
directed by Eleanor Holdridge
TRAVELS WITH exhilarating 2010-2011 BSO season
with musical selections from Bach,
kennedy-center.org/openhouse
Some events may require free tickets.
(You need to darken a room some-
what, he says, or you’ll never get
Post-mat Free Discussion "Protests & Punishment"
with Rabbi Tamara Miller, Pastor John Wimberly and MY AUNT Barber, Mozart, Mahler, Schumann
and Shostakovich and more.
The Kennedy Center welcomes patrons with disabilities.
decent blacks, no matter how
bright the projector. Using a dark-
Naeem Baig, (Islamic Circle for Social Justice) Directed by Kasi Campbell
TKTS / INFO: Ride Metro to Foggy Bottom-GWU Station. Then take the er screen helps — for an old War-
Special Holiday Discount: Save $10 with code TJ10 “…four first-class performances …
brilliantly directed.” – DC Theatre Scene FREE shuttles running every 15 minutes beginning at 11 a.m. hol film, in lousy condition, he
800-494-TIXS • www.theaterj.org
NOW – September 12
1.877.BSO.1444 once projected on black.)
Wed/Th/Sun @ 7, Fri/Sat @ 8, www.BSOmusic.org Major support for the Open House Arts Festival and Celebrate Mexico 2010 is made possible by
There are brighter projectors
ROUND HOUSE THEATRE Sat/Sun Mat @ 2 out there — he’ll be renting as
The Morris and Gwendolyn many as a dozen, at 15,000 lumens
Bethesda
TKTS/INFO: 410-772-4900 WORKSHOPS Cafritz Foundation
“Superb…clever” —– The Express www.repstage.org B & CLASSES B each, for a piece that artist Doug
Aitken is planning to project onto
THE TALENTED B DINNER THEATRE B
Additional support is provided in part by the D.C. Commission on the Arts & Humanities, an agency supported in part by the
National Endowment for the Arts, and the Kennedy Center Washington Committee on the Arts. the facade of the Hirshhorn — “but
MR. RIPLEY
A play by Phyllis Nagy
Mystery Dinner Playhouse DANCE The National Symphony Orchestra Open House performance is funded in part by the
Dallas Morse Coors Foundation for the Performing Arts.
Additional support for the Multicultural Children’s Book Festival is provided by
in terms of museum standards,
these are just about top of the line.”
For the first time, Masino is hop-
Adapted from the novel
by Patricia Highsmith
MURDER CLASSES Celebrate Mexico 2010 is presented in association with the National Council for the Arts and Culture (Conaculta, Mexico), the Em- ing for projectors with centralized
Directed by Blake Robison LAS VEGAS STYLE! BEST bassy of Mexico, the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Fiesta D.C., and the Mexican Cultural Institute. computer controls, so he can ad-
Sept. 8 - 26 just them from his office and pro-
A killer casino murder mystery PRICES! gram their on and off times.
Sheraton Crystal City Hotel
$10 & $15 tix for age 30 & under 1800 Jefferson Davis Highway, Arlington, VA
Over ¼million dancers since 1976! 4 Week Course - $49 As for the future, it’s likely 3-D.
International Programming at the Kennedy Center is made possible through the generosity of the
TKTS/INFO: 240-644-1100 Every Fri & Sat at 7:30; Sun at 6:30 Swing•Salsa•Ballroom Kennedy Center International Committee on the Arts. “I have no experience with that
roundhousetheatre.org RESV/INFO: 888-471-4802 703-528-9770 dancefactory.com yet,” says Masino, “but I know it’s
n 4545 East-West Hwy. x www.mysterydinner.com Prkg & Metro Shuttle 954 N. Monroe, Arlington at VA Square Metro[ coming.”
— Blake Gopnik

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STEVE MCQUEEN: “Deadpan 1997.” A scene from Buster Keaton,
given a black protagonist in its video version.
LEE STALSWORTH/HIRSHHORN MUSEUM AND SCULPTURE GARDEN
DOUGLAS GORDON: “24 Hour Psycho.” Classic film, slowed to a
crawl in video. A new medium gives new life to an old one.
video art from E4
It’s true that the moving image
hit its stride long before that mo-
ment. There’s a convincing argu-
ment that the feature film, as pro-
jected in theaters for more than a
century now, is the great art form
of the modern world, easily out-
signifying paintings and sculp-
tures and installations.
But if we narrow our scope to
the fine art we find in museums,
then projected film has never had
much luck.
Experimental cinema has al-
ways been “quarantined” from
other museum-worthy artworks,
Viola says. Early on, it was mostly
seen in sit-down auditoriums
where visitors were expected to
stay from beginning to end. Even
in the 1960s, when some films mi-
grated to gallery spaces, it was of-
ten for short-term festivals or
scheduled screenings.
Barbara London, a curator at
the Museum of Modern Art in
New York who was an early adopt-
er of media art, remembers how
PAUL HACKETT/REUTERS
and mechanical and clunky, have
to be set down right among the
people watching a piece, because
their lenses need to point straight
toward the middle of the screen.
Visitors become acutely aware of
how an image is produced, and are
even likely to cast their shadows
onto it by accident. Tacita Dean, a
wonderful British artist who
works exclusively with film, re-
cently showed a multi-image piece
at the Guggenheim Museum in
New York. Visitors were so in-
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trigued by the projectors in their
midst that they used them to
dance shadow puppets across the
poor artist’s screens.
With current video, on the other
hand, the compact, lightweight,
mostly solid-state machinery is de-
signed so it can be mounted high
up near the ceiling, where it’s so
out of the way it almost vanishes.
The image can appear on the wall
or in an installation almost as an
apparition, without much evi-
dence of how it got there. Contrast
that to videos shown on monitors:
Whatever the images they carry,
they always also register as high-
tech objects — as lame sculptures
made of shiny metal and black
plastic with the words “SONY” or
“PANASONIC” on their fronts.
With the advent of high-defini-
tion projections, which are just
now taking over, scan lines and
pixels and other classic “artifacts”
of the technology are on their way
to disappearing. Viola says that at
long last he finds himself satisfied
with “the amount of visual infor-
mation they can cram in there” —
as much as there is on 35mm film,
he believes. A video projection
barely even reads as video any-
more. It comes off as a free-float-
ing, medium-free image — “a mov-
ing stream of consciousness that
connects with yours,” as Viola puts
it.
Video has finally started to
achieve the kind of cultural trans-
parency that painting once had.
Before photography, when the
world appeared to us in images,
we simply assumed that it came
clothed in paint. We didn’t remark
on the medium itself. It was sim-
ply the carrier for its subject mat-
ter.
That’s where video may be to-
day. “Ultimately, it now comes
down to content,” says Viola.
Today’s projected art can be
about almost anything. It can be
about a fictional society in chaos,
as in the wonderful show that
MoMA gave last year to Dutchman
Aernout Mik, whose projections
touched down in spaces across the
museum. Or it can be about time
and light at the North Pole or the
drowning of a fast-food joint, as in
the Hirshhorn’s projections.
Video projections are so much
not about themselves that they can
even channel and revive older me-
dia. The latest Site Santa Fe bien-
nial, titled “The Dissolve,” is all
about how low-tech, handmade
art forms — especially as used in
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early cinema — have been reani- photos or paintings or sculptures. thousand dollars, videos are still
mated as video. The African Amer- With video, the simple possibility far cheaper — and far, far harder to
ican artist Kara Walker has a pow- that something new might come sell — than paintings or sculptures
erful new video that presents on screen helps keep viewers en- by equivalent artists. And video al-
straight, almost documentary gaged. Even the plainest, slowest ways encourages the transgres-
footage of a shadow-puppet play video has storytelling potential. sive, radically populist thought
set in the Jim Crow South. A com- Compared with most earlier art, that, somewhere out there in the
pelling video by Ezra Johnson, a projected video also adds a subtle ether, there is a pirated copy to be
young New Yorker, tells the story element of magic, of escape from had for a few dollars or free.
of an Old Master art theft and a the material. There’s something But then, thanks to our mu-
fire, using a handful of crude oil about the projector’s image, not seums, you may not even have to
paintings that are painted and re- even microns thick and disappear- hunt for a bootleg. That video
painted for each new frame of ani- ing at the flick of a switch, that you’ve heard so much about may
mation. Thanks to video, coarse helps keep it feeling pure. Works be coming soon, to an exhibition
modern painting gets to talk about in painting or sculpture or even in- near you.
the value of fine old painting, and stallation art can feel like baubles gopnikb@washpost.com
how it plays out in a cops-and- for the rich; videos, no matter the
robbers world. cash they sometimes fetch, always
The German artist Thomas De- feel a touch removed from such VIDEO ON THE WEB Experience
mand, best known for photos of pedestrian consumption. some of the new innovations in
cardboard reconstructions of real Even priced at a few hundred video art at washingtonpostcom/style.
scenes, presents cellophane candy
wrappers animated as raindrops.
(The piece was shot on 35mm film,
but curators persuaded Demand
B A LT I M O R E S Y M P H O N Y O R C H E S T R A
to let it join their show as a work in
high-def video.)
The very first piece you encoun-
ter in the biennial, almost its tal-
isman, is an old-fashioned flip
Season Preview
book of flying planes by Japanese
artist Hiraki Sawa — presented
Concert
wall-size, as a projected video of
the book’s pages being flipped.
with Marin Alsop
Site Santa Fe is full of nostalgia
for obsolete technologies, because
video manages to let the old feel
new again. A silly flip book, a
coarse puppet show, the crudest
oil paintings — all these media and
others can boost their currency by
passing through the projector’s
lens. Once projection was per-
fected, video became the new nor-
mal in art. “It actually did start to ALL TICKETS $10!
take on the aura of being the new
painting in gallery spaces,” says Friday, September 10, 2010 at 8 PM
Brougher. “It held the wall like a Music Center at Strathmore
big history painting. It moved —
but history paintings had always Join Music Director Marin Alsop and the Baltimore
seemed to move.” Symphony Orchestra for a preview concert sampling
It’s almost as though, in our TV-
the exhilarating 2010–2011 BSO season. With musical
addicted culture, the static three
dimensions of traditional art — of selections from Bach, Barber, Mozart, Mahler,
actual sculpture or of painted per- Schumann and Shostakovich plus witty insight from
spective — barely cut it anymore. Marin Alsop—this one-of-a-kind concert is a must-see!
A work of art needs to engage the
fourth dimension, time, even if it
started life painted or drawn. “I
really like to be called a time art-
1.877.BSO.1444 | BSOmusic.org
ist,” says Viola, because time is
what his video adds to the mix.
The art work’s time breeds view- Visit us at cfa.gmu.edu
ing time as well. One recent morn-
ing, a half-dozen people were visit-
ing the Hirshhorn’s Black Box to
watch that flooded McDonald’s:
Most of them stayed five, ten, fif-
teen or the full 21 minutes the pro-
jection lasted. They wouldn’t have
Joel Grey
spent close to that long with most Saturday, September 25 at 8 p.m.
The incomparable Joel Grey,
winner of both a Tony and an
EFFECTIVE SUN. TH Oscar for his scene-stealing role
as the emcee in Cabaret, joins
M a 20-piece orchestra to sing,
dance, and tell stories, taking
RI 8-9 OR the audience on a virtual tour
-7
of his more than 50 years in
the show business spotlight
with songs by Kander and Ebb,
Joel Grey’s performance is part of Rodgers and Hart, Billy Joel,
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Brougher, who is 57, had his first
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those you’ve seen to get more out DEER PARK PRODUCT OF ITALYI BELLA FAMIGLIA MUSSETTE
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of them, barely glancing at others.
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The video projector, that is, has Everything you love, is close to home — Alexandria’s thriving art scene,
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changed the art of the moving im- critically acclaimed restaurants, and chic boutiques nestled in distinctive
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schedule, to being about works, in getaway, go to VisitAlexandriaVA.com.
a setting. It has made artistic mov-
ing pictures migrate from the
DR. BROWN SILVER PALATE “EXTRA” BRAWNY EMERIL
“SPICES OCEAN SPRAY GOLDEN TABATCHNIK’S RICHFOOD 100% Sept. 9: Second Thursday Art Night at the
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world of film to the world of paint- Torpedo Factory Art Center
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Seemingly trivial facts about
video projection have had pro-
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found implications for its success CARRINGTON WELCH RICHFOOD Sept. 18&19: The Colonial Market & Fair
KELLOGGS ’S 100% ITALIANSTYLE POLANER SWISS MISS GREENS & KEMPS SUN OF ITALY
as a museum-based art form. HERBAL
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Today’s video projectors, for
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the ones typically used for film, al- PKG. 20 SQUEEZE

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FT SCOTTIES
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mounting exhibitions at the
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art forms; they’ve broken out of Visit us online for a complete calendar of events and Reservations Powered By

the cinema ghetto. $ /$3 since 6 sign up for our free Access Alexandria e-newsletter.
© 2010, Alexandria Convention & Visitors Association. All rights reserved.
Film projectors, already noisy

M
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thursday, september 9 , 2010
THE RELIABLE
SOURCE
MEDIA NOTES
A new blog
Solar power In his new Media Notes
from the past? blog, Howard Kurtz says
An environmentalist the media are inflaming
wants President Obama to things by trumpeting the
reinstall a Carter-era solar Florida pastor who wants
panel on the White House to burn Korans this weekend.
roof. C2 washingtonpost.com/medianotes.
3 LIVE TODAY @ washingtonpost.com/discussions
FLYING HIGH: Staff discuss Spencer Finch’s “Passing Cloud,” 2010, a site-specific sculpture made for the Corcoran’s
rotunda that alludes to the light and color of a day in 1863 when Walt Whitman watched Abraham Lincoln ride by.
Being on
cloud nine
Spencer Finch’s ‘Business’ perceives the sky
in wholly different ways
S
pencer Finch| is a big baby. I
mean that as a compliment.
Finch is 47, and lives in a
loft in Brooklyn, N.Y., but
it’s the baby in him that
makes him one of the
smartest, most original art-
ists working today. No other adult
would think of making work quite like
what’s on view in “My Business, With
the Cloud,” Finch’s new solo show at the
Corcoran. It opens Saturday as the first
in the museum’s “NOW” series on con-
temporary art.
M
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ABCDE
Style
“
In my eyes, my journalistic pedigree is pretty
strong.”— Piers Morgan, a judge on “America’s Got Talent” and chosen to replace Larry King on CNN. C6
STUMPED SPEECH
‘No silver bullet’
Maybe there isn’t, but it’s being
fired off by lots of politicians. C10
Got plans? The Going Out Gurus are here to help 1 p.m.
A RT R E V I E W
by Blake Gopnik
New theories in psychology bill babies
as in some ways smarter and more
aware than the adults they become.
Adults have learned to focus, laserlike,
on just the things that matter — which
means that they stay unaware of most of
what’s around them. The very young, on
the other hand, are open to everything
that’s in their world, because they need
to learn so much about it. They refuse to
preconceive what matters and what
doesn’t. That’s where Finch sits.
His art, like so much art that’s come
before, is about depicting the world —
M
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DAILY 09-09-10 MD RE C1
RADIO
An Al Jazeera deal?
Pacifica Radio may broadcast the
Arabic news network locally. C3
KATHERINE FREY/THE WASHINGTON POST
landscape art you could call it, almost.
But it takes a whole new tack on which
parts of the landscape are worth de-
picting and what it might mean to de-
pict them. It’s as though Finch stays
conscious of aspects of reality that the
rest of us have grown up to ignore, then
finds new ways to let us in on his expan-
ded vision.
“Passing Cloud,” the single, giant
piece that he’s installed in the Corco-
ran’s grand rotunda, gives a picture of
art review continued on C9
The tragic
themes of
a literary loss
U-Va. journal staffer
died by his own hand, tions in the country. According to
but he reached out first Maria
by Daniel de Vise
The Charlottesville offices of
the Virginia Quarterly Review are
dark. The locks have been
changed. Most of the staff have
resigned or taken leave. There
were two competing
drafts of the fall issue,
one assembled by the
journal’s editor, the oth-
er by members of his es-
tranged staff. The win-
ter issue has been can-
celed.
There are two diver-
gent accounts, as well, of
why the managing edi- Kevin
tor of the University of Morrissey
Virginia’s esteemed lit-
erary journal walked to a lonely
coal tower on a July morning and
shot himself in the head.
Surviving relatives and some
co-workers portray Kevin Morris-
sey, 52, as the target of a work-
place bully. Their narrative has
an unlikely villain: Ted Geno-
ways, 38, a decorated poet who
led a transformation of the Re-
view from a low-budget black-
MUSIC REVIEW
Gaga turns Verizon into
a self-love camp meeting
by Chris Richards
The most commanding mo-
ment in Lady Gaga’s riveting
Tuesday night concert at Verizon
Center had nothing to do with
the arsenal of angular, asymmet-
rical frocks that aggrandized the
superstar’s teeny-tiny frame.
It came during the crescendo
of “Telephone” when she ordered
her fans — she affectionately
calls them “little monsters” — to
tuck their camera phones back
into their Levis and get in the
moment.
It was a retina-searing specta-
cle — a two-hour pop bacchanal
that utilized buckets of fake
blood, spark-spewing bustiers,
head-banging harpists, a flaming
piano and plenty of esteem-
building speechifying. Lady Ga-
ga didn’t bring her “Monster
ALL OUT: From Madonna’s bustier to Grace Jones’s growl to
Prince’s stiletto-dancing, Lady Gaga used every tool in her arsenal.
K
Y
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and-white journal into a colorful,
edgy magazine that is cited
among the best literary publica-
Morrissey, Kevin Morris-
sey’s sister, a caustic e-mail from
Genoways was on her brother’s
computer screen when he died.
Genoways and some of his sup-
porters say Morrissey’s death was
simply a suicide: a man choosing
to die and blaming no one, leav-
ing a note that said, “I can’t bear
things anymore.”
The investigation has
divided the literary
community. Some have
vilified Genoways as the
archetypal bad boss, a
symbol of the dysfunc-
tional workplace. But a
letter submitted to sev-
eral publications last
month and signed by 30
Review contributors de-
fends the editor-poet as
“professional, tactful,
and respectful.”
After weeks of mounting scru-
tiny, the university is questioning
its own role in the affair. Teresa A.
Sullivan, who assumed the presi-
dency of Virginia’s flagship pub-
lic university two days after Mor-
rissey’s death, said in an Aug. 19
statement that the suicide had
suicide continued on C4
G What does Lady Gaga
wear to yoga class? The
Reliable Source, C2
Ball” tour to Washington to be re-
duced to a snapshot.
She aspired to be that encour-
aging little voice stuck in your
head, and carpet-bombed her set
with numerous micro-sermons
about empowerment and accept-
ance. (As if singing the songs that
have been stuck in our head for
the past three years wasn’t al-
ready enough.)
“Don’t leave loving me more,”
she urged the capacity crowd,
hundreds of whom came dressed
as their idol. “Leave loving your-
self more.”
Having already altered the def-
inition of pop stardom, the 24-
review continued on C2
TRACY A. WOODWARD/THE WASHINGTON POST

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2010
At the Corcoran, cloudy days from Spencer Finch
art review from C1
the cloud in its title and of the
light that passes through it. It
does that by giving us the light it-
self along with the cloud. High
under the room’s dome Finch has
suspended a huge “cloud” as-
sembled from 110 crumpled the-
atrical gels in an assortment of
pale blues and grays. Light pierc-
ing the rotunda’s skylight passes
through the tangle of filters on its
way to us below, so that it winds
up matching the blueness and
brightness of the light we’d see on
a bright day under a passing
cloud.
Finch could have given us that
cloud by painting or photograph-
ing it, like his great cloud-art
predecessors John Constable and
Alfred Stieglitz. But he prefers to
make cloud art that actually
works on us the way a cloud-filled
reality would. Cross from one
side of the rotunda to the other,
while keeping your eyes focused
on your hands or clothes, and you
see the light on them pass from
blue to a sunny yellow-white.
One way to understand Finch’s
piece, then, is to keep your eyes
turned away from it. There aren’t
many other art works you can say
that about. Is a cloud mostly
about what it happens to look like
or what it does? For Finch, it’s the
doing that matters.
One thing atmospherics do is
evoke particular places, and the
times we’ve stood in them. “Pass-
ing Cloud” registers the cloud
light at the corner of Vermont Av-
enue and L Street NW one day
this July. Finch stood there with
an electronic light- and color-
meter, then later matched those
readings with his filters in the
Corcoran’s rotunda. He chose
that particular corner because it
resonates in our cultural history.
It was where Walt Whitman used
to stand, in July of 1863, to bow to
Lincoln as the president made his
daily trips to the White House
from his summer retreat in
Washington’s north end. That is
the moment and the light that
Finch’s piece evokes, or at least
tries to.
The history itself — the physi-
cal and material reality of being
there, then — is forever lost to us.
Finch knows that. His piece in
some sense proclaims it. It tries,
and fails, to put us there, then.
And the poignancy of that failure,
of the irrevocable lost-ness of the
past despite our best efforts to re-
vive it, is part of what this work is
about.
All of Finch’s art tries to get
closer to what matters in the
world, by leaving behind the sur-
face appearances that most art
has always been about and that
most adults dwell on. And then it
acknowledges the near impossi-
bility of getting very far, no mat-
ter how wide-eyed innocent you
remain. Upstairs at the Corcoran,
Finch presents a number of other
pieces that make the same effort
at baby-like vision.
One major new work is wildly
peculiar, even by Finchian stan-
dards of eccentricity. It’s a room-
filling assemblage of 64 fluores-
cent fixtures, two and three and
four feet long, joined at their
ends to become something like a
Spencer Finch prefers to make cloud art that actually works on us the
way a cloud-filled reality would. . . . Is a cloud mostly about what it
happens to look like or what it does? For Finch, it’s the doing that matters.
After trying to help his mom, a son gets it from all sides
Dear Amy:
My 83-year-old widowed mother
and I were having our weekly
phone conversation last night (I
live in California; she’s in New
York) when she began to repeat
herself over and over — more than
a dozen times.
I kept asking her, “Why are you
repeating yourself?” My mother’s
cognitive skills are exceptional,
and this odd behavior had me
worried.
She had earlier complained
about how hot it was, and I
suspected the heat may have
contributed to her problem. I
asked her if she was feeling okay,
and she said she was fine, but
again she began to repeat herself.
I told her I would call her back,
then tried to get a hold of my sister
who lives 20 minutes away. No
luck.
I called my brother and asked
him to call her. He spoke with her
and then called me back, agreeing
that she sounded strange.
I took it upon myself to call 911.
An ambulance went to the house.
The EMTs examined her and found
nothing wrong.
Now she refuses to speak with
me. She says I humiliated her.
What is the proper protocol
here? She lives alone and I
CLOUDY: Seventeen prints make up Spencer Finch’s “Taxonomy of Clouds,” in which differing clouds are depicted in puddle reflections.
CLOUD-LIKE? Each tube in Finch’s “Open Cloud” represents one
of the famous cloud studies that Constable painted in the 1820s.
geodesic dome gone wrong.
Imagine trying to depict a storm
cloud using 64 Tinkertoy rods,
and you’ll get some idea of the
shape and strangeness of Finch’s
sculpture, called “Open Cloud.”
Clouds again, yes, but this time
taken from art rather than his-
tory.
Each of the fluorescent tubes
represents — as always with
Finch, you have to use that verb
ASK AMY
couldn’t reach anyone, so I
decided to send help. I worried
that she might be having a stroke.
Now my brother and sister say I
overreacted. Amy, what do you
think?
A Very Concerned Son
You did the right thing. Your
mother is embarrassed, your
siblings are backing her up, but
there are far worse fates than a
little embarrassment. Suffering a
stroke, for instance, and not
getting help.
The fact is, something was
wrong with your mother, and she
should follow up with her doctor.
Take this incident as your
wake-up call to work with your
siblings and your mother on
making some small changes so
she can continue to live safely at
home.
I recommend you look into a
monitoring service. For a
monthly fee, she can have an
intercom installed onto her
phone line and a “panic” button.
This adds another set of ears,
another entity in the chain of
contact and another person
available to try to assess her
needs. You should also add a
couple of neighbors to your
contact list.
M
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KLMNO
loosely — one of the famous cloud
studies that Constable painted in
the 1820s. Finch began his piece
by observing a stripe across the
surface of each Constable, nar-
row enough so that the variations
in color and brightness across its
painted sky were reduced to a se-
ries of abstract colored bands. He
then reproduced those bands on
the surface of his fluorescent
tubes by sliding short lengths of
Dear Amy:
I know a man, “Gregory,” who
has terminal cancer.
He and his family are
acquaintances of mine, not really
friends, and I don’t see them that
often.
The last time I saw his wife,
several weeks ago, she indicated
he might have only a matter of
days to live, so he may already
have passed away.
We don’t really have any mutual
friends from whom I would hear if
he had died.
The next time I see one of the
family, what should I say?
It would sound dumb to ask,
“How is Greg doing?” since I
already know he is dying, but it
sounds insensitive to say, “Is Greg
still with us?”
Uncertain
You can search online for an
obituary for your acquaintance
through obituaries.com, which
features obits in local newspapers
listed state by state. There is a
high likelihood you would be able
to learn of this person’s death
through this search.
Otherwise, you could call
“Gregory’s” wife and say, “I want
you to know that I have been
thinking about your family since
M
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vision of Constable our eyes ex-
pect, with their very adult goal of
confirming things we already
know. Instead, it gives us Con-
stable’s own light.
Look around at the other
Finches in the gallery, or rather
look around at the air and space
around them, and you’ll realize
that the filtered bulbs in “Open
Cloud” are casting a outdoorsy,
even British illumination on ev-
erything else. It’s as though the
light captured in Kent in the
1820s by Constable’s paint were
infiltrating this gallery, now. (It’s
important to visit the show dur-
ing daylight hours, when the in-
candescent lighting is off.)
Another piece, called “Taxono-
my of Clouds,” consists of 17
framed color photos that depict
some of the different kinds of
clouds that scientists have
named. Except that, instead of
taking the obvious step of looking
up, Stieglitz-like, to shoot his cu-
muli and stratuses, Finch has
found them reflected in puddles
in dirty Brooklyn streets. Where
the rest of us adults would only
see the things, the puddles, in
front of us, Finch looks at them
and sees everything they show. If
we then take our lead from him,
ignoring things and paying atten-
tion to the full range of our sensa-
tions, we realize that the glass
PHOTOS BY KATHERINE FREY/THE WASHINGTON POST protecting Finch’s photos is also
reflecting clouds — this time, in
the shape of the glowing fluores-
cent tubes of Finch’s nearby
“Open Cloud.”
If this art sounds a touch con-
fusing, it should. There’s no quick
take on Finch’s work, no instant
read, no 20-minute visit to his
show. Its complexities deserve to
be unpacked, the way you’d work
at one of the more metaphysical
poems of John Donne or Emily
Dickinson. (The show’s title is a
line from Dickinson.)
It takes the brains of a baby to
do it.
gopnikb@washpost.com
Spencer Finch: My Business,
With the Cloud
opens Saturday at the Corcoran Gallery
of Art, 500 17th St. NW, and runs
through Jan. 23. Call 202-639-1700 or
visit www.corcoran.org.
REPRESENTATIONAL?
Finch’s “The Four Seasons
(Specific Humidity, Northern
Hemisphere, 2010)” is another
in Finch’s exhibit “My Business,
With the Cloud,” opening on
Saturday at the Corcoran.
sleeving, in blues and grays and
even sunset-pinks and golds,
along their lengths. His 64
striped tubes mimic 64 stripes
across Constable’s paintings —
without ever looking a bit like a
Constable.
“Open Cloud” certainly cap-
tures something important about
Constable’s pictures, with an at-
tempt at almost scientific pre-
cision. But it refuses to give us the
I saw you a few weeks ago. I was
so sorry to learn of Greg’s illness.”
She could then fill in to say, “He
passed away” or “He’s still
fighting and in the hospital.” You
can react with an expression of
sympathy or concern.
It’s okay not to know what has
happened. If he has died, you can
simply say, “I’m so sorry, I didn’t
know.”
Dear Amy:
Regarding “Worried,” whose
husband had started criticizing
her every move: I knew when my
ex-husband starting behaving like
that, and generally acting totally
miserable, that my marriage was
in trouble.
We are often afraid to ask the
key questions that we should ask. I
hope “Worried” won’t be afraid to
take that step. It could save her
marriage.
D
I agree that it is vital to talk —
before someone walks.
Write to Amy Dickinson at askamy@
tribune.com or Ask Amy, Chicago
Tribune, TT500, 435 N. Michigan Ave.,
Chicago, Ill. 60611.
© 2010 by the Chicago Tribune
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